Methodology
Short on purpose. The trust mechanism is the SourceStamp chip next to every price across the site, not this page.
The SourceStamp rule
Every vendor price, every processing rate, every hidden-fee dollar amount on this site is rendered with an inline SourceStamp chip. The chip links to the actual vendor price sheet plus the Wayback Machine snapshot for that capture date. Verified 2026-06-20. If a price is older than 90 days, the chip turns amber on the chit-card surface.
What we refuse to do
- We do not infer a rate for a quote-only vendor. Heartland, NCR Voyix Aloha, Revel, Oracle MICROS implementation, post-acquisition TouchBistro add-ons are all quote-only.
- We do not average ranges. If a vendor band is $14.95 to $84.95/mo, we report the band, not the midpoint.
- We do not report a vendor's "starting at" number without the conditions attached, and we re-check the tier name as well as the number. Lightspeed's $69 tier is now called Starter and the tier called Essential is $189, so a figure carried forward under the old label would be 2.7x out. Revel no longer publishes a rate card at all: revelsystems.com redirects to Shift4 on every path, so we moved it to quote-only rather than keep an archived $99.
- We do not accept vendor-provided fact sheets. Only the public price page or the public contract addendum counts.
Processing fee modelling
The calculator splits monthly card volume into card-present and card-not-present buckets. CP rate × CP volume + per-txn fixed × CP txn count, plus the same on CNP. Default CP share is 78%, which matches FSR field experience but is a calculator input you can change.
Interchange data is the Visa USA Interchange Reimbursement Fee schedule Visa IRF · 2026-06-20 and the Mastercard merchant interchange schedule MC IRF · 2026-06-20. Restaurant MCC 5812.
The 3-stop color scale (green / amber / red)
The vendor chits on the calculator chit-rail, the homepage vendor grid, and every compare page use a 3-stop semantic color scale: green for vendors whose all-in monthly is at or below the cheapest vendor + 5%; amber for the middle band; red for the most expensive vendor on the same inputs.
The colors are not decoration. They carry meaning. A green chit means "cheapest, or within 5% of cheapest, on the inputs you have set right now." A red chit means "most expensive on the inputs you have set right now." If you change the inputs (terminals, volume, segment), the colors re-rank live because the underlying all-in totals re-rank. The same scale applies on the homepage vendor grid where the calculator runs against the FSR default profile.
Toast Volume Subscription Fee
Added March 2026. 10bps on processed volume, surfaced in the Toast central knowledge base, not on the front-of-house pricing page Toast VSF · 2026-06-20. We model it specifically on Toast in the calculator. We do not apply it to other vendors.
Refresh cadence
Vendor sheets re-verified quarterly. Material changes (new SKU, repricing, contract-term change) trigger an out-of-cycle refresh and a footer date stamp update. Stale prices over 180 days are removed entirely until re-verified.