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Square Is Discontinuing Monthly Pricing On February 1, 2014

Posted by Unknown on from the something-about-being-easier dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mobile payment startup Square has decided to discontinue its monthly pricing option on February 1, 2014. The company says it does not plan to reinstate monthly pricing at any point. If you are currently enrolled in monthly pricing, Square will give you "a grace period" through the end of January 2014, after which the per-swipe rate will apply to transactions. On January 2, monthly pricing subscribers will be billed their last monthly fee, which will cover the rest of the month."

8 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Swipe? by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So after many years of regulations, encryptions, standards, tamper proof systems, migrating from a magnetic strip to the chip and pin for even greater security, this company's innovation pisses all that against the wall?

    Man... I would not do business with anyone who wants to swipe my credit card through an iPad.

    1. Re:Swipe? by BKX · · Score: 4, Informative

      Simply opening one of the card readers will completely brick them.

      Probably not. I've repaired and/or replaced many keypads and phone jacks on CC terminals over the years. I've done this for readers made by several different companies and many levels of features, including Hypercom (the most popular brand), and terminals that have RFID readers and external pinpads. Opening them up has always been easy, and they accept my soldering iron and screwdrivers just fine. I doubt there's much in the way of tamper-proofing on the portable ones either, even though I've never worked on them, considering the lack of tamper-proofing on anything else they make.

    2. Re:Swipe? by BitZtream · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Thats because you utterly fail to understand any part of the process. This isn't insightful, its just the opposite, it shows ignorance.

      First off, the strip on your card, not encrypted in the first place, its just data. Encrypting it offers nothing of value as you would then just end the encrypted blob, which anyone could also copy and send. You can read it with a modified 8 track player and some software (this is essentially how square works) or any of the thousands of various card readers that hook up to a PC as if it were a keyboard.

      None of the data stays on the iPad, its simply forwarded off to squares servers to do the real work.

      Do you think its a better setup to do the card reading on a virus and malware infected PC instead, you know, one of those PCs that you run your card through every day at the gas station or restaurant you eat at instead of the walled garden that Apple built.

      If this bothers you, it just shows you're ignorant of the actual security concerns. You should be far far more concerned with the waiter or mcdonalds employee you hand your card through that can just snap a pic of it when you're not in sight.

      --
      Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  2. Re:wut? by digitalchinky · · Score: 5, Informative

    It appears to be some kind of slashvertizement for a mobile credit card reader that plugs in to the headphone jack of an iphone.

  3. Advertisement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This _might_ deserve a blurb in a payment industry trade rag, but why /.?

    Are we covering all merchant fee plan changes in the that industry now?

  4. Re:wut? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I personally don't think equiangular polygons should have the right to decide pricing schemes. IMNSHO humans, and only humans, should be able to make choices like that. Otherwise what's next, a glorified calculator deciding when to fire people? It's wrong, I say, WRONG!

  5. Re:Big deal. by aaronb1138 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Really a good sized hit to small to middle sized businesses.. you know the mom & pop shops, indie food trucks (the minority) and such that manage to support 2-5 people with corporate incomes of 250k-2m per year.

    A small company with CC swipes of $120k / year with an assumption CCs only being half their income, and the rest cash or invoices (checks), barely supports 1 person if the net margins are very high, in the 20-40% range and tax sheltering is very good.

    Glad to see how well educated the techie community is on basic finance and business concepts.

    Of course, we know that with the standard margin in CC processing being 3% for many years, it was very expected by any reasonable person that Square would ditch flat rates once they had little enough competition and a large enough base.

  6. Re:It is not flat by kramerd · · Score: 5, Informative

    The plan was $275/month or 2.75% per swipe. However, the 275 per month was limited to the first $10,000 (ie $275 in fees). After this, it defaulted to the 2.75% anyway. Therefore, if you chose monthly, and didn't use it all, you actually paid a higher price. By definition, you could always just take the 2.75%, so I don't know why anyone would ever choose the monthly plan in the first place.