The Hidden Bill in Field Service Software: Payment Processing Rates Compared

The line nobody puts on the pricing page

Field service software ads lead with $49 or $129 a month. The number that actually moves the P&L is the percentage taken when the customer taps Pay. A 3-truck shop running $40,000 a month through cards at 2.99% pays about $1,200 a month in processing — four to eight times the software bill. Per-tech subscription math is the first TCO lever. This is the second.

Where the money actually goes

A card payment has a real cost underneath it. Most of it is interchange, set by Visa and Mastercard and paid to the bank that issued your customer's card — typically 1.5–2.0% plus a few cents on a consumer card, more on rewards and commercial cards. Add card-network assessments of roughly 0.14%, and a processor's own margin on top. Nobody moves money for free, and nobody gets below interchange.

What differs between platforms is who holds the merchant account, because that decides who keeps the difference between the real cost and the rate you are quoted.

• The platform owns the account.Housecall Pro and Jobber both work this way. They sit on top of a processor at volume pricing — in practice something close to interchange plus a thin margin — open a sub-account in your business's name underneath theirs, and quote you one all-in rate. The gap between what the payment costs them and the 2.9% they charge you is theirs to keep. On a shop doing $40,000 a month, a 70-basis-point spread is about $3,400 a year of pure margin. This is not a criticism; it is the business model, and it is a large part of why field service software companies care so much about getting you onto their payments product.
• You own the account. GridBoss works this way. You connect your own Stripe account over OAuth, the money moves from your customer into your account, and Stripe bills you its published rate directly. GridBoss never touches the funds and takes no cut of them.

The trade-off is honest in both directions. A platform that owns the account can buy wholesale and resell — so in principle it could undercut retail, though in practice none of them do. A platform that connects your account cannot resell anything, so it has nothing to mark down. What it can do is charge nothing, which is what GridBoss does on every plan.

The 2026 rate card

Competitor figures below are what those companies publish or what independent 2026 breakdowns consistently report, and they are all-in. The GridBoss row is all-in too — it is simply Stripe's published US rate, because the GridBoss share is zero. Confirm against your own statements: blended rate (Amex mix, keyed-in cards, instant payout) is what you actually pay, not the homepage number.

Housecall Pro's ladder is from their own help center. Jobber's card and ACH rates are what shops see in Jobber Payments settings and what 2026 pricing writeups repeat; tap-to-pay is the discounted presentment rate. The GridBoss row is Stripe's published US pricing, unmodified, because GridBoss adds nothing to it. Your Stripe rate is between you and Stripe, so if you negotiate volume pricing your number goes below the one above and stays yours. The GridBoss card-present row assumes a Stripe reader — a countertop or handheld device you buy once, not tap-to-pay on a phone, which needs an app GridBoss does not have.

Worked example: $40k/month in cards

Eight-person plumbing shop. $40,000 a month collected on card, mostly from emailed invoices — the common path when the tech sends a link from the truck. Call it 160 invoices.

• Housecall Pro at 2.99% online: $1,196/month, $14,352/year.
• Jobber at 2.9% + $0.30: roughly $1,208/month, $14,496/year.
• GridBoss, which is Stripe at 2.9% + $0.30 with nothing added: roughly $1,208/month, $14,496/year.

On a pure card book the three are within about $12 a month of each other. Anyone claiming a dramatic card saving in either direction is rounding in their own favour. Cards are a commodity; the subscription line is where that comparison is actually decided.

Worked example: the commercial book

Now the same shop, but with a property-management contract: six invoices a month averaging $6,000, paid by bank transfer rather than card. $36,000 a month of ACH.

• Housecall Pro or Jobber at an uncapped 1%: $360/month, $4,320/year.
• Stripe at 0.8% capped at $5 — the cap binds above $625, so every one of these invoices costs exactly $5: $30/month, $360/year.

That is $3,960 a year on a book that is not even the majority of the revenue, and it gets worse for the incumbents as the invoices get bigger, because their percentage never stops. This is the single largest difference between GridBoss and the bundled platforms, and it exists for a structural reason: an uncapped percentage on a bank transfer bears almost no relationship to what the transfer costs, so it is margin. We are not collecting that margin, so we have no reason to uncap it.

The same logic applies to Amex and commercial cards. Housecall Pro charges 3.49% on both. Stripe charges its standard 2.9% + $0.30 regardless of card brand, so a shop with a lot of Amex-carrying homeowners quietly saves another half point.

Side-by-sides for the rest of the product: vs Housecall Pro, vs Jobber, vs ServiceTitan.

Rate vs speed

A cheaper percentage on an invoice that sits for 21 days is still a cash-flow problem. The move that usually beats another 20 basis points:

1. Tech marks the job complete.
2. Invoice goes out with a payment link in the same SMS.
3. Customer pays before the truck leaves the driveway, or that evening.

Shops that do this routinely cut days sales outstanding in half within a month. GridBoss sends that link from the job. So do the incumbents. Getting paid in two days instead of twenty-one is worth more to most shops than a point of rate.

What you give up for a cheaper rate

Be honest about the extras bundled into a higher processing bill:

• Consumer financing / BNPL partners (Housecall Pro prices these separately, and they are the right tool for $8k+ replacements).
• Instant payout (Instapay / Jobber instant) if you genuinely need money the same afternoon — that 1% is a cash-advance fee, not a processing rate.
• A polished tap-to-pay reader workflow if most of your collection happens at the kitchen table, not on a link.

If those are how you close, keep them. If you are paying 2.99% on emailed invoices for a reader you do not use and financing you run through a bank anyway, you are donating basis points.

How to read your own statement

1. Pull last month's processing report from your current platform. Ignore the advertised rate. Divide fees by volume. That is your blended rate.
2. Split the book: emailed invoice vs keyed vs present vs ACH vs instant payout.
3. Reprice the emailed-invoice slice at 2.9% + $0.30. It will come out close to what you pay now — that slice is a wash.
4. Reprice the ACH slice at $5 per payment, or 0.8% on anything under $625. On a commercial book this is usually where the whole decision is.
5. If you are also paying per-user add-ons, add the subscription delta. The two numbers together are the real switch math.

Want it run on your statement instead of a hypothetical? Book 30 minutes or start a 14-day trial and connect Stripe. If your book is almost all consumer cards, expect a wash on payments and decide on the subscription instead — we would rather you hear that here than find it on your first statement.