Every restaurant owner has a card machine quote in a drawer somewhere. It usually looks like this:
- Terminal rental: £20/month
- Transaction fee: 1.69% (debit), 2.39% (credit)
- Authorisation fee: 1p per transaction
- Monthly minimum: £500 in volume or a £10 "inactivity fee"
- PCI compliance: £24/year
- Contract: 3 years
- Early termination: £450
Most owners never read past line 2.
What Stripe costs
- Per UK card transaction: 1.5% + 20p
- Setup: £0
- Monthly rental: £0
- Monthly minimum: £0
- PCI compliance: included
- Contract: none
- Termination: stop processing whenever
No rental, no minimum, no tie-in. You pay Stripe when Stripe helps you take money. Zero when you don't.
The maths at typical volumes
Let's say you take 300 card payments a month at an average £15 each = £4,500 in monthly card volume.
Traditional terminal (typical high-street):
- Rental: £20
- Transaction fees (blended 2%): £90
- Per-transaction auth: £3
- PCI compliance (annualised): £2
- Total: £115/month
Stripe:
- Transaction fees (1.5%): £67.50
- Per-transaction (20p × 300): £60
- Total: £127.50/month
Wait — Stripe is more expensive? At this volume, yes, slightly. The 20p per transaction bites when your average order is small.
Where Stripe pulls ahead
Two places.
1. Higher average order. Stripe's flat 1.5% + 20p means that on a £30 order Stripe charges 65p. Traditional terminal charges 60-90p depending on card type. Past an average order of £20, Stripe is cheaper.
2. No contract, no minimum. If you have a quiet January, Stripe costs you nothing. Your traditional terminal still costs £20-£30. Over a year, that's £240–£360 saved on the slow months alone.
What else you get with Stripe
- Apple Pay and Google Pay included — no extra setup, no extra fee.
- Fraud protection, chargebacks, disputes all handled through the dashboard.
- Next-day (sometimes same-day) payouts to your bank.
- A usable web dashboard instead of a dot-matrix printout.
When a traditional terminal still wins
One scenario: very high-volume, very low-average-order. Think a busy kebab shop selling £6 meals to 1,000 customers a night. The 20p-per-transaction starts to hurt. You might negotiate a 0.3% + 3p deal with a traditional acquirer.
For basically everyone else — cafés, bistros, gastropubs, small restaurants — Stripe wins on flexibility and total cost over a year, even if any individual month is close.
The hidden switching cost
The biggest barrier isn't fees, it's inertia. You've had the same card machine for 5 years. Switching feels like a project. It isn't — Stripe onboarding for a UK limited company takes about 10 minutes and they verify you automatically.
With OrderTap, we handle the integration for you. Sign up, click "Connect with Stripe" in your dashboard, fill in the Stripe form. Done.