What are your card payments really costing you?

Card processing costs are rarely a single number. Most UK merchant statements combine several different charges, and it is the combination — not any one headline rate — that decides what you actually pay each month. This calculator pulls those charges apart so you can see where your money is going before you make any decision about changing provider.

Your current processing costs

The largest element is usually a percentage taken from every card sale. Depending on your agreement this may be a single blended rate, separate debit and credit rates, or interchange-plus pricing where the card scheme's own costs are passed through and a margin is added on top. Commercial, business and international cards normally cost more than a standard consumer debit card, which is why two businesses on the same headline rate can end up with very different bills.

Authorisation and per-transaction fees

Alongside the percentage, many providers charge a small fixed fee for each authorisation — often a few pence per transaction. This is easy to overlook but it matters enormously if your average transaction value is low. A café taking hundreds of small payments a day can pay more in authorisation fees than in percentage charges, so the calculator treats them separately rather than folding them into one rate.

Terminal and service charges

Then there are the fixed monthly items: terminal rental, account or service fees, PCI compliance charges, gateway fees and settlement or funding costs. These are fully independent of how much you turn over, so they weigh most heavily on quieter months. The calculator also separates genuinely exceptional charges — PCI non-compliance penalties, chargeback and retrieval fees, one-off adjustments — because those distort a month's figures and should not be treated as your normal running cost.

The illustrative 0.80% scenario

To show the scale of any potential difference, the public version of this tool models your same volume at an illustrative 0.80% transaction rate. That figure is a comparison scenario, not an offer or a quotation. It exists so you can see roughly how sensitive your bill is to the percentage rate, and whether the gap is large enough to be worth a conversation at all. Quite often the honest answer is that you are already priced fairly.

Why actual Dojo pricing can be different

Real pricing depends on your card mix, average transaction value, monthly turnover, trading history, sector risk and the hardware you need. None of that can be inferred reliably from a single estimate, so your actual rate may be better or worse than the illustrative scenario shown here. Any firm pricing is confirmed in writing before you commit to anything.

Why uploading a statement improves accuracy

Entering figures from memory usually captures the percentage rate and misses the smaller recurring items — which is exactly where unnecessary cost tends to hide. A recent statement contains every line, so an upload produces a far more realistic total. The extracted figures are always shown to you in editable fields to check and correct before any result is produced.

Uploading is entirely optional. You can type your figures in manually or run a quick estimate instead, and you never need to give contact details to see your results. If you do upload a statement purely to use this calculator, it is processed in memory and is not written to our storage. It is only stored if you separately and explicitly choose to send it to Ryan for a full human review.