[adyus]

I'm not sure what Square charges, but a regular POS from your business bank would be far, far less in percentage for in-person, card-present transactions. I've seen 1.5% figures here in Europe.

So far, Stripe seems to have lowered the fixed fee from 30¢ to 5¢ and dropped 0.2% off their payment gateway fees.

[earlz]

I've heard Europe is more reasonable, but at least as of a few years back before Square got so popular, there was a ton of fees to having a bank-owned card reader. Typically required >$1000 deposit just to get the machine, and then a subscription in excess of $200/month, and if I remember correctly, card present transactions were around a 2.5% fee... oh, and that was typically just for Visa and Mastercard. The people I knew with these machines never sprung for the other networks because the price was so expensive. My parents run some small businesses, and credit card machine fees were one of the major line items in their monthly expenses before getting one of those cheap square phone devices back in 2012 or so. Maybe the banks have made things more competitive though now that Square has taken at least some of their business.

[TomMarius]

My previous startup has card payments from EU cards for 0.9% and 5 CZK

[dementik]

In EU I work for company taking 0.3% on debit cards and 0.9% for CC. Additional 0.02€ per transaction.