Square Is Discontinuing Monthly Pricing On February 1, 2014

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."

Comments

Re:wut?

[digitalchinky]

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

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[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:wut?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:It is not flat

[kramerd]

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.

Re:Swipe?

[BitZtream]

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.