From what I understand, in order to charge customers’ credit or debit cards, you need to use a payment processor like Paypal or Stripe. It seems like the fee for using this service is around (4% + $0.50) per transaction.
To get around this, you could make users link a bank account for ACH transfer or use crypto to circumvent this fee.
Specifically for my situation, I’m offering a B2C SaaS subscription service with plans around $5 or $10. The fees are pretty steep for these smaller monthly transactions, am I just forced to pay these fees if I want to take online payments?
For a broader audience: in your startup, how do you accept payments, who is the processor, and what fees are you paying?
The payment processor is the middle man between you, your customer, and the bank/credit card companies.
They take a cut to process the transactions (share it with the CC companies as well) and clearing real-time across the bank networks (if you ever charge something at a major retailer on your CC and look at your CC in 15min, you will see that ‘pending’ transaction).
You can find cheaper processing. Most most banks will enable you to take credit cards as long as you have a business banking account with them, which will be cheaper than going with Strip, but have less features. Just search around.
Its the cost of doing business and you want to ensure that this is setup well. As a customer, I do not like paying via ACH, as once the $$ is gone very hard to get back.