Type last month's card volume and total fees and the effective rate appears below, free. Upload the statement and for $29 you get, within two business days, a neutral audit that separates interchange from your processor's markup, lists every junk fee in dollars, states what a fair interchange-plus quote would look like for your card mix, and includes the letter to send your processor. We are not a processor, we refer no processor, and we take no referral fees.
Two numbers from last month's statement. The rate shows as you type; leave an email and we reply with what the number means for your kind of business and what the statement lines behind it usually are.
You own a restaurant, a dental or medical office, a shop, or a B2B firm, and somewhere between $20,000 and $500,000 a month goes through a card terminal or a POS. A rate-increase notice arrived, or a processor's rep offered a "free audit", or a peer told you what they pay and it was less, or your bookkeeper asked what the lines on page three mean. The owners asking about this on r/restaurantowners and r/smallbusiness put it as "Square fees … wondering if this is normal" and "How much are you guys paying for Toast?", and one of them posted a full statement breakdown under the title "Anatomy of a 9.4% Rip-Off: How a processor charged 698 basis points over cost."
The free audits on offer come from people whose business is switching you, and the consultants who will read the statement for you keep a percentage of the savings for years. This audit is for the owner who wants the statement read once, for a flat fee, by someone with no processor to sell.
| Tier | What it includes | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Free effective rate | Type last month's card volume and total fees. The page shows your effective rate on the spot. Leave an email and we reply with what the number means for your kind of business and what the statement lines behind it usually are.Free; nothing to refund. | $0 |
| Single-statement audit | Upload one statement. You get the effective rate, the interchange / assessments / markup breakdown with its reconciliation, every junk fee in dollars, the fair interchange-plus figure for your mix, and the letter to your processor.Refunded in full if we cannot reconcile the statement's fee lines to its total within tolerance (we say so and deliver nothing rather than guess). | $29 |
| Three-month audit with negotiation script | Three consecutive statements, so drift and downgrades show. Everything in the single audit for each month, a month-over-month table, a switch-or-stay comparison in dollars with no processor named, and a negotiation script for the call after the letter.Refunded in full if we cannot reconcile at least two of the three statements within tolerance. | $149 |
| Monthly monitoring | You forward each month's statement. We re-run the audit and reply within two business days with the effective rate, any new fee lines, and any re-pricing since last month. Billed monthly; cancel any month.Any month whose re-run does not arrive within two business days of the statement is not charged. | $19 / mo |
Reading a processing statement is arithmetic over public tables. Visa and Mastercard publish interchange; assessments are published; everything left over is the processor's, and the only hard part is that every processor formats the statement differently. The market prices that arithmetic in two ways, and neither is a flat fee.
| Who | What it costs | What they sell |
|---|---|---|
| Processor and ISO "free audits" (merchantstatementaudit.com: "receive a free professional fee audit within 24 hours") | free | a switch to their processing |
| Shared-savings consultants (Verisave: "We earn a percentage of the money we save you"; Merchant Cost Consulting: "our fee is a percentage of the savings") | a percentage of savings, for years; the percentage is not published | the renegotiation, with their share attached |
| This audit | $29 flat for one statement; $149 for three | the reading and the letter; you keep all of any savings |
A flat fee is only believable if no processor money ever reaches us, so none does: no referrals, no commissions, no "preferred partner". That is the whole reason the price is a number instead of a percentage.
The effective rate on its own does not answer that, because a business that takes mostly rewards and corporate cards pays more interchange than one that takes debit, and interchange is the part nobody controls. The audit answers it by separating the interchange your card mix actually cost from the markup your processor added on top, and then stating what a fair interchange-plus markup would look like for that mix. That is the number to compare, and it is the number the letter asks for.
A free review from a processor is a sales call with a spreadsheet attached; its job is to move you. That can still be worth hearing. This audit has no processor to move you to, names none, and is paid for by the fee, so the breakdown and the letter are written to get your current fees down rather than to start a new contract.
No. We do not contact your processor. The letter is written to be sent as is, and the $149 tier includes the script for the call that usually follows, but the sending and the talking are yours. Consultants who negotiate for you are paid a share of the savings for years; this is the flat-fee alternative.
Flat-rate pricing still has an interchange cost underneath it, and the audit shows what the flat rate is costing you over that cost for your mix. Whether to stay flat-rate or ask for interchange-plus is a judgment the three-month tier lays out in dollars, with no processor named.
Then we say so and refund the audit. Every processor formats statements differently, and a statement that will not reconcile to its own total is not one we will guess at. That refund condition is the one on the price table.
These are public asks and market facts that shaped the offer. They are not customer testimonials.
“Square fees ... wondering if this is normal.”r/restaurantowners, January 26, 2026
“How much are you guys paying for Toast?”r/restaurantowners, January 6, 2026
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