This is actually one of the very few things that has bothered me about Stripe – they don't make their volume pricing public (Amazon does, now Balanced does). We've had to email when we hit larger sums to get pricing reduced.<p>Edit: although to be fair, I asked them about this, and they said their processing costs vary user to user, so they don't have a simple matrix (rather, they apply discounts based on the costs associated with an account). That's probably the best possible answer short of a pricing matrix...
And to further the transparency, Visa & Mastercard also publish their interchange fees, which is the main cost for a processor like Balanced.<p>Here's Visa's: <a href="http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-reimbursement-fees-april2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://usa.visa.com/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-...</a> For online the fee program is usually "e-Commerce Basic".<p>So here's Balanced's interchange costs, for Visa:<p>Major debit cards[1]: 0.05% + $0.21<p>Unregulated debit cards (small banks): 1.65% + $0.15<p>Non-rewards credit cards: 1.8% + $0.10<p>Rewards credit cards: 1.95% + $0.10<p>Visa Signature Preferred (highest-end Visa cards): 2.4% + $0.10<p>Mastercard is usually similar. AmEx is usually more expensive.<p>-----------<p>[1] This 0.05%/$0.21 rate is super interesting to note. The Durbin amendment was recently passed and regulates most debit card interchange down to practically nothing. This basically just happened and is potentially a huge profit center for processors who haven't updated their fees to reflect it. My guess is processors are right now all looking at each other and waiting to see who breaks rank.. but for the moment, merchants are not necessarily seeing the benefit. Processors are.
I've been dealing with credit card merchant accounts for our company for many years. The lack of transparency in the industry made it impossible to know if I was getting the best rates possible. Then I found <a href="http://www.cardfellow.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.cardfellow.com</a> where major providers compete for your business. All bids are cost plus based, so you can do a real comparison of the bids. Rates are locked in for life. You can keep the gateway that you're currently using. I ended up with a different division of the same provider I was using, but at a much lower rate. This reduced my net merchant account cost by 3 percentage points. Give it a try. There's no cost. And I have no connection to CardFellow other than that of a very happy customer.
I'm sorry if this is stated somewhere but I have not seen it anywhere. How are these thresholds calculated? Is this per store/merchant account or for the whole marketplace?
Cool. So this is essentially per marketplace? I've just launched simplegym.co that uses Balanced for handling payments. We currently are only doing around $10K/month in payments, but I believe it could grow into the discounted volume over the next few months.
I am really trying to integrate balanced into my software but I am just getting stuck. A few video tutorials or a live workshop/meetup/hack day would really help!