Lifted Payments vs Square: interchange-plus vs flat-rate.

This is a comparison of two pricing philosophies more than two brands (see also Lifted Payments vs Stripe, another flat-rate platform). Square publishes one flat rate for everyone; Lifted Payments quotes interchange-plus after reading one of your real statements. Both are legitimate models. Which one costs you less depends almost entirely on how much you process and what kinds of cards you take — so here are the actual numbers, side by side. (For the national context behind them — swipe-fee totals, card mix, fraud — see our 2026 processing statistics.)

The numbers, side by side

Square's figures below come from its published pricing (squareup.com/us/en/pricing and its fee schedule), as of July 2026, for the free base plan; legacy Square accounts may be on older rates.

Square figures: squareup.com published pricing, free plan, as of July 2026. Lifted Payments has no published flat rate by design — interchange varies by card, so the honest quote comes from your statement.

Where Square wins

Comparison pages that pretend one side has no case aren't worth your time, so here's Square's, plainly:

• Zero monthly base fee. If you process a few hundred dollars a month, a $15/mo software fee is a real percentage of your volume. Square's pay-only-when-you-sell model wins low volume outright.
• Instant self-serve setup. Sign up online, get a reader, take a card the same week. No statement review, no underwriting conversation. For a market stall opening Saturday, that speed is the feature.
• Predictability. One published rate means you can compute your card cost on a napkin. Interchange-plus statements are more transparent but genuinely busier to read.
• A big bundled ecosystem. Free POS software, an online store builder, invoicing, and appointments in one account is a lot of tooling for a brand-new business.

Where Lifted Payments wins

• As volume grows. A flat rate bundles a margin above wholesale cost into every sale, and that margin scales with your volume. Interchange-plus fixes the markup, so growth stops raising your effective rate — see the break-even math below.
• B2B and commercial cards. Business, corporate, and purchasing cards qualify for lower interchange when Level 2/3 data is attached. Lifted appends it automatically, and under interchange-plus the savings land on your statement, not the processor's. On a flat rate, they can't — your rate is the rate. See B2B card processing.
• Transparent per-fee pricing. Every interchange category, assessment, and the markup itemized line by line. You can audit what you pay — and take the statement to a competitor to keep everyone honest.
• One accountable team. Gateway, boarding, hardware, and support from the same people — with card processing on the Maverick gateway and ACH/eCheck on NMI, so invoiced payments can move to the cheaper bank-to-bank rail. See merchant services.

The break-even math

Here's the honest version of "interchange-plus saves money": it saves money above a crossover point, and costs more below it, because of the $15/mo software fee. The following is a Lifted Payments illustrative estimate — interchange varies by card mix, so your real rate is quoted from a statement, not from this table.

Assume a $50 average ticket, mostly consumer cards tapped in person, and an illustrative all-in interchange-plus cost of about 2.1% + 18¢ per sale (wholesale interchange and assessments plus a disclosed markup). Square's published card-present rate is 2.6% + 15¢. Per $50 sale that's roughly $1.23 vs $1.45 — about 22¢ saved per transaction, which needs to cover $15/mo before interchange-plus is ahead. That's roughly 68 transactions, or in the neighborhood of $3,000–$4,000/mo in card volume.

Lifted Payments estimate for illustration only. Interchange varies by card type and how the transaction is captured; actual pricing is quoted after a statement review. Square rates per squareup.com, July 2026.

Two things move the crossover earlier. If you key in cards — phone orders through a virtual terminal — Square's rate jumps to 3.5% + 15¢, and the per-sale gap widens a lot. And if you take commercial cards, Level 2/3 data pulls your wholesale cost down further, which only helps you under interchange-plus. The cleanest way to see your own crossover is the effective rate calculator, or the ideas in how to lower your processing fees. Weighing another flat-rate provider? The same math drives our SwipeSimple alternative comparison.

Card-present on real hardware: the PAX A920Pro

Lifted's counter story runs on the PAX A920Pro, a purpose-built Android smart terminal with a printer, running the Lifted Pay app — PAX-signed and PayDroid-certified. Cards are end-to-end encrypted at the read head and stored only as tokens, which is what the design enables after the sale: cards on file, and refund-after-settlement — refunding yesterday's settled sale from the terminal with no PAN ever re-entered. More on the security model in tokenization & SAQ-A, and on the device in the PAX A920 setup guide.

One honest note on keyed entry: typing a card into a browser-based virtual terminal is a different PCI posture (SAQ C-VT) than tokenized capture — worth knowing whichever provider you choose. For how the A920 stacks up against the closed-ecosystem devices, see PAX A920 vs Clover vs Square Terminal.

The bottom line

If you're processing under a few thousand dollars a month, or you need to take a card this week, use Square — the flat rate is a fair price for zero fixed cost and instant setup. If your volume is steady and climbing, if B2B or commercial cards are part of your mix, or if you want to see exactly where every basis point goes, interchange-plus is the model built for you. The proof either way is one statement: send it over, and you'll get a line-by-line comparison against what you pay today — no application fee, no obligation.