Why flat-rate pricing quietly works against software companies
One price for everything sounds simple. Look at where the difference goes.
The standard offer looks clean: 2.9% + 30¢ online, around 2.65% + 10¢ in person. One rate, no surprises. But a flat rate is an average — and averages hide margins. The actual cost of a transaction (interchange) varies card by card. The gap between that cost and the flat rate is profit, and under a flat-rate model, none of it reaches the software company that created the transaction.
Think about what actually happened: your product signed the merchant, built the checkout, ran the register. The payment volume exists because your software exists. Yet the economics flow entirely to the processor, and your reward is a bill.
Interchange-plus changes the geometry
Kuvex prices on interchange-plus: the true cost of the card, plus a transparent margin. Two things follow. First, merchants generally pay less — which makes your product easier to sell. Second, the margin is visible, which means it can be shared. The ISV who brings the merchant participates in the payment revenue, month after month.
For a SaaS company with a few hundred merchants, that residual isn't a rounding error. It's a second recurring revenue line that grows with your customers' success — the kind of income your current payment provider keeps for itself.