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A restaurant owner in Chagrin Falls walked into our office last spring with a stack of processing statements. Three years with the same processor. She had never once understood what she was paying or why.
She's not unusual. We see this every week.
Most owners pick a credit card processor, sign the paperwork, and never look at the statements again. Processors count on exactly that. The pricing models they lean on (tiered, bundled, flat-rate) are built to be confusing enough that you won't notice when rates creep up or a new fee appears.
Interchange-plus pricing works differently. It's the most transparent model in the business, and it's the only one we offer at Cloud 9. If you run a shop in Ohio, that difference shows up every month.
What is interchange-plus pricing?
Every time a customer swipes, dips, or taps a card at your counter, three parties take a cut:
- The card-issuing bank (Chase, Capital One, and so on) charges an interchange fee
- The card network (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, Amex) charges an assessment fee
- Your processor, which is us, charges a markup
Interchange-plus breaks all three out on your statement. You see the exact interchange rate for every transaction, plus a small fixed markup from your processor. Those are the only line items.
The interchange part is set by Visa, Mastercard, and the other networks. Nobody changes those rates, not your processor, not us. They're the same for every processor in the country.
The plus part is your processor's markup, and it's the piece you actually get to see. With interchange-plus it's a fixed percentage and a fixed per-transaction fee. It doesn't move month to month or shift around based on card type. You always know exactly what you're paying us.
How is it different from tiered pricing?
Tiered pricing is what most traditional processors use. They sort your transactions into buckets ("qualified," "mid-qualified," "non-qualified") and charge a different rate for each.
It sounds reasonable until you look at who controls the buckets. Your processor decides which one each transaction falls into. A regular Visa debit card might be "qualified" at 1.69%. A rewards Visa credit card gets bumped to "non-qualified" at 3.49%. You have no say over which cards your customers hand you.
The categories are vague on purpose. The criteria for "qualified" versus "mid-qualified" aren't standardized across the industry, so a processor can shift transactions between tiers more or less at will. Plenty of them do.
With tiered pricing, you're trusting your processor to categorize your transactions fairly. With interchange-plus, there's nothing to categorize. You see the actual cost of every transaction.
What about flat-rate pricing?
Flat-rate pricing is what you get from Square, Stripe, and PayPal. One rate for everything, usually 2.6% + $0.10 per swipe, or 2.9% + $0.30 for online transactions.
It's simple. It's rarely cheap once your volume grows. Flat-rate holds up fine under maybe $3,000–$5,000 a month, but past that you start overpaying, and the reason is debit. Many debit transactions carry interchange as low as 0.05% + $0.21. On interchange-plus you'd pay that plus a small markup. On flat-rate you're still handing over 2.6% on the same card.
A retail shop in Cleveland doing $25,000 a month told us they were happy with Square. "It's simple," they said. We ran the comparison. They were overpaying by $287 every month, which comes to $3,444 a year. Simple is not the same as cheap.
How much can interchange-plus save an Ohio business?
Here are real numbers. A typical small business running $20,000–$40,000 a month in card transactions can expect to save $400+ per month by moving off tiered or flat-rate pricing.
A rough breakdown:
- Tiered pricing often works out to an effective rate of 2.8%–3.5%
- Flat-rate usually sits at 2.6%–2.9%
- Interchange-plus typically lands between 1.8%–2.3%, depending on your card mix
Take a restaurant doing $35,000 a month at a 3.0% effective rate. That's $1,050 in processing costs. Drop it to 2.1% on interchange-plus and you're at $735, a savings of $315 a month, or $3,780 a year.
That's the conservative version. Shops with a lot of debit volume save more, because debit interchange runs well below credit.
Why don't more processors use interchange-plus?
Most owners don't realize there's an alternative. The industry has spent decades training businesses to accept whatever pricing they're handed, and tiered has been the default since the early 2000s.
The real reason comes down to money. Processors make more on tiered pricing. When they control which bucket your transactions land in, they control their margin. On interchange-plus the margin is fixed and sitting right there on the statement, with nowhere to hide extra profit. That's exactly why we use it.
Can I see the difference on my statement?
You can, and it's one of the real practical benefits of interchange-plus.
On a tiered statement, you'll see line items like: - Qualified: $12,450.00 @ 1.69% = $210.41 - Mid-Qualified: $5,200.00 @ 2.29% = $119.08 - Non-Qualified: $3,800.00 @ 3.49% = $132.62
It looks clean, but you have no idea which transactions went where, or why.
On an interchange-plus statement, you'll see the actual interchange category for each batch of transactions: - Visa Debit Regulated: $4,200.00 @ 0.05% + $0.21 - Visa Credit Consumer: $6,800.00 @ 1.51% + $0.10 - Mastercard World Elite: $2,100.00 @ 2.05% + $0.10 - Processor markup: 0.20% + $0.10
You can see every category and check it yourself. Visa publishes its interchange rates, so you can pull them up and confirm exactly what you're being charged.
What hidden fees should I watch for even with interchange-plus?
Interchange-plus kills the biggest source of overcharging, which is opaque transaction rates. Some processors still bolt junk fees on top of it. Watch for these:
- PCI compliance fees, where $79–$149 a year is normal but $30+ a month is excessive
- Statement fees, often $5–$10 a month and sometimes negotiable
- Batch fees, usually $0.10–$0.25 per batch, minor but worth knowing
- Annual fees, which shouldn't exist with a good processor
- Rate increase notices buried in your statement fine print
We wrote a whole guide on this: hidden credit card processing fees every small business owner should watch for.
Our interchange-plus pricing comes with no hidden fees, no contract, and no annual rate hikes. We built the business that way on purpose.
Is interchange-plus right for every business?
Almost. If you're running more than a few thousand dollars a month in card volume, interchange-plus will almost certainly beat tiered or flat-rate.
The one case where flat-rate still makes sense is a very small operation, a weekend pop-up or a solo freelancer doing under $3,000/month in card sales. When the dollar amounts are that small, the simplicity is worth something.
But if you're running a restaurant in Akron, a retail store in Canton, or a professional services firm in Cleveland and you're processing $15,000+ per month, you belong on interchange-plus.
Why does Cloud 9 use interchange-plus exclusively?
Because we think the relationship between a business and its payment processor should run on transparency instead of fine print.
We don't want to profit from confusion. We'd rather earn your business with a fair price, good technology, and local support you can actually reach. Our office is in Chagrin Falls. When you call, a real person answers. When something breaks during dinner service, we're there the same day.
Interchange-plus is one piece of that, and it's the foundation. When you can see exactly what you're paying and why, you don't have to take our word for anything.
See our full pricing breakdown to understand how the programs work, or read how dual pricing can cut your effective processing cost even further.
Ready to see what you're actually paying?
Pull your most recent processing statement. If you can't tell exactly what your processor's markup is, you're probably overpaying.
Send it to us. We'll run a free savings analysis and show you what interchange-plus would look like for your business, with no contract and no commitment to find out.
Get your free statement analysis, or call us at 1-855-297-6722 and we'll walk through it together.
