Card fees are designed not to hurt. They are taken as a percentage, deducted before the money arrives, and shown on a statement nobody reads. On a four pound coffee it is about twelve pence, which is nothing, which is the point.
A hundred and fifty coffees a day is eighteen pounds. A week is a hundred and twenty-six. A year is six and a half thousand pounds that never reaches the person who made the coffee.
The arithmetic nobody does
Take a business turning over two hundred thousand a year on cards. At two per cent, that is four thousand pounds. At three, six thousand.
Put next to the things a small business actually agonises over, it is a strange number to have never examined:
- A part-time member of staffTwo days a week for most of the year.
- A used vanThe thing you have been putting off replacing.
- Your accountant, several times overWith change left for the software.
- A rent increase you would fightNobody accepts a four thousand pound rent rise quietly. This one arrives without a letter.
And it is not once. It is every year, rising with your turnover, for as long as you are in business.
Then there is the waiting
The fee is the visible cost. The delay is the one that actually bites, because it shapes what you can do.
Two to three working days between a sale and the money being usable means Friday's takings are Tuesday's cash. Over a bank holiday, longer. If you are paying suppliers weekly and staff monthly on money that is always three days behind, you are running a business on a permanent overdraft you did not ask for.
The fee is what it costs. The delay is what it prevents.
And the third one, which is worse
A chargeback. A payment you took months ago, goods long gone, reversed against you on a claim you often cannot meaningfully contest. Plus a fee for the privilege of losing it.
It is rare enough that most owners have only had a few, and memorable enough that they can all tell you about them.
What the alternative actually looks like
A stablecoin payment costs a fraction of a penny to move, regardless of the amount. Not a fraction of a per cent — a fraction of a penny. Fifty pounds and five thousand pounds cost the same to send.
It settles in about a second, directly into a wallet you control, with nobody holding it in between. And once it has settled it is settled: there is no mechanism by which it comes back out months later.
The honest part. Nobody is switching off their card machine this year. Your customers overwhelmingly still pay by card, and turning away a sale to save twelve pence would be a bad trade.
This runs alongside. A tag on the counter costs about thirty pounds, against three hundred for a terminal plus rental. Every customer who uses it is a sale with no percentage taken and no three-day wait.
Where the numbers get interesting
You do not need everyone to switch. You need some of them.
If a fifth of your takings move across, that two hundred thousand pound business keeps eight hundred to twelve hundred pounds a year it was handing over. And because you saved it, you can afford to give some back — a discount for paying directly, credit towards next time — which is what persuades the next customer, which is the only mechanism by which any payment method has ever grown.
That is what card schemes did for thirty years with interchange. The difference is that this time the saving starts with you rather than passing through a network first.
Ceodore takes nothing from your sales. A flat monthly subscription, and every penny your customers send you is yours.