Three charges, only one of which is a rate
Take the defaults in the form: 5.25 percent, ten cents a transaction, $9.95 a month for the reader, on a machine doing 680 vends of which 62 percent go through the reader. That is 422 cashless vends a month, so the monthly charge works out at 2.36 cents a vend. On a $1.75 item the percentage part is 9.19 cents and the fixed part is ten cents, which is already more than the percentage, and the three together come to 21.55 cents — 12.31 percent of the vend.
Nobody quoted 12.31 percent. The statement said 5.25 and the other two lines were somewhere else on the page.
The rate is a function of the price
Run the same three charges up the ladder and the all-in rate goes 29.97 percent at fifty cents, 17.61 at a dollar, 12.31 at $1.75, 9.37 at $3.00 and 7.72 at $5.00. It is a hyperbola, not a line: percentage part plus a fixed number of cents divided by the ticket. The fixed cents are the same on a fifty-cent gum vend as on a five-dollar sandwich, which is why the small ticket is where the whole problem lives.
This has a consequence that surprises people the first time. If you move a whole machine up in price, the effective rate improves at every position, and the improvement is largest on the cheapest items. Going from $1.75 to $2.00 on that item takes the rate from 12.31 percent to 11.43 percent while the money paid goes up, from 21.55 cents to 22.86 cents. Both statements are true and they point in opposite directions, so quoting either one on its own is a way of winning an argument rather than settling it.
Where the reader charge should be counted
The monthly charge is the one people leave out, because it does not appear on the transaction. Spread over 422 cashless vends it is 2.36 cents; on a machine doing eighty cashless vends a month it is 12.4 cents each, which on a $1.50 item is worse than the percentage part on its own. A reader on a slow machine is a fixed cost pretending to be a variable one, and the way to see it is exactly the division this page does.
That is also the honest answer to whether cashless pays on a given machine. It is not a question about the rate. It is a question about how many cashless vends the machine will do, because the fixed charge does not care.
The other half of the payment picture is the cash side, and it is not free either. What a price ladder does to the coin tubes, and what a route has tied up in floats and spends counting them, is in the coin float and cash handling calculator. If the price move you are weighing here is really a response to a cost rise, the delivered cost per vend calculator works out how much of a rise the ladder actually has to absorb.
What the page deliberately does not do
It does not tell you whether a surcharge, a cash discount, a minimum purchase or a rounded price is allowed, priced fairly, or disclosed the way it should be. Those are matters between you, your processor and the card networks, and they differ by state, by network and by contract. The three fields want numbers copied off your own statement and nothing else. If two statements for two of your own accounts disagree, run the page twice — that disagreement is real and it is worth seeing in cents per vend rather than in basis points.
Questions people ask
What does a card fee actually cost on a $1.50 vending sale?
At a 5.25 percent rate with ten cents a transaction, the transaction charge is 17.88 cents, which is 11.92 percent. Add a $9.95 monthly reader charge over 422 cashless vends and it is 20.24 cents, or 13.49 percent. The number that matters is the cents, not the percentage: on a $1.50 item at a 78 cent cost, that fee is a quarter of what the vend was going to leave you.
Why does my effective rate not match the rate I was quoted?
Because a quoted rate is a percentage and your statement has at least two other things on it. A per-transaction amount is a fixed number of cents, and a monthly device charge is a fixed number of dollars, and dividing either of them by a small ticket produces a large percentage. The quoted rate is the limit your effective rate approaches as the ticket grows, and vending tickets never grow.
Does raising vend prices lower the processing rate?
It lowers the rate and raises the cents. The percentage part scales with the price so it contributes the same share at any ticket, while the fixed parts stay put and shrink as a share. Whether the move is worth it turns entirely on how many vends you lose at the higher price, which no calculator can tell you — only your own meter over the weeks after a change can.
Should I count the monthly reader charge in the fee per vend?
For deciding whether a reader belongs on a particular machine, yes, and it is often the deciding line. Divide the monthly charge by the cashless vends that machine actually does. On a busy machine it disappears into a rounding error; on a slow one it can be larger than the percentage and the per-transaction amount combined, and no rate negotiation touches it.