Hybrid Surcharge
Enter your monthly volume and Credit/Debit mix to see your estimated current cost, proposed cost, and potential monthly and annual savings.
Why We Created Hybrid Surcharge Pricing
When credit card surcharging first became popular, it solved a major problem for dealers: recovering the cost of accepting credit cards.
As surcharging spread across the industry, nearly every payment processor adopted the same pricing model:
Credit Cards: 3.00%
Debit Cards: 1.50% - 3.00%
Because the pricing was simple, dealers accepted it as the new standard. But very few ever stopped to ask one important question:
Why are debit cards priced as a flat rate at all?
The Hidden Cost of Flat-Rate Debit Pricing
Under traditional merchant processing, most dealers are billed using interchange pricing on debit cards. Interchange is the wholesale cost established by the card networks, with the payment processor adding a small markup. Most of the time, resulting in very low debit fees.
When surcharge programs were introduced, that model disappeared.
Instead, processors began charging every dealer the same flat debit rate—typically around 1.50%-3.00%—regardless of what the actual processing cost was on the debit card.
For many debit transactions, the true processing cost is only a fraction of that amount.
The result is that dealerships often pay processor markups that are several times higher than what they would have paid under traditional interchange pricing.
While 1.50% – 3.00% may seem reasonable since you no longer pay the credit processing fee, those extra costs can quietly add up to tens of thousands of dollars each year.
Introducing Hybrid Surcharge
We believe there is a better way.
That’s why we created Hybrid Surcharge.
With Hybrid Surcharge, your business receives:
Credit Cards: Flat 3.00% surcharge pricing
Debit Cards: Interchange + 0.40%
This allows dealers to continue recovering credit card costs while paying fair, transparent pricing on debit transactions.
Instead of paying an inflated flat-rate fee on every debit card, your dealer pays the actual wholesale interchange cost plus a modest processing margin.
Why This Matters
Debit cards represent a significant percentage of transactions in a dealer and the percentage of debit typically increases with surcharging.
Even a small reduction in debit processing costs can create meaningful savings over the course of a year.
For many dealers, Hybrid Surcharge can reduce payment processing expenses by tens of thousands of dollars annually compared to traditional flat-rate surcharge programs.
A Smarter Way to Surcharge
The goal of a surcharge program should be to reduce payment processing costs—not replace one expensive pricing model with another.
Hybrid Surcharge was designed to give dealers the best of both worlds:
Recover credit card acceptance costs
Avoid excessive markups on debit transactions
Maintain transparent, wholesale-based pricing.
Keep more money in your business every month.
If your business is currently using traditional processing or a flat-rate surcharge program, we’ll be happy to provide a complimentary analysis comparing your current costs to our Hybrid Surcharge solution. You may be surprised by how much you’re overpaying.