Payment Processing · Buyer guide
If you run vending machines, a laundromat, a car wash or an arcade, the card reader quotes look steep next to what a shop pays. Cantaloupe charges 5.95% of every card sale. Nayax's US shop quotes the same 5.95% for a machine whose cheapest item is under $5. A shop on a flat-rate processor sees a lower percentage, but it pays a fixed fee on every sale too: on Square's standard in-person rate of 2.6% + 15 cents, a $5 coffee costs 5.6%.
The difference is mostly the size of the sale, not the provider. On a $1.50 purchase, the fixed part of card pricing swamps the percentage, and a debit card from a large bank carries the most expensive fixed fee of all. We read the published pricing of the unattended providers the site has reviewed and the card networks' current rate tables and rules. Prices are as published on 2 October 2026.
Cantaloupe makes the ePort and Engage readers found on vending machines, laundry machines and car-wash vacuums. Its online store lists the processing fee as "5.95% per credit or debit card transaction", and no Cantaloupe store page lists a fixed per-transaction fee. Bought outright, a reader kit costs $329 for the basic G11 and Engage kits and up to $414 for a Pulse kit with a power supply, plus a monthly service fee of $9.95, or $12.95 for the Cashless Plus package. Most kit pages set a 12-month commitment on the monthly fee, and leaving early costs the monthly fee for every month left.
Cantaloupe One rents the hardware instead, from $18.95 a month per reader for a pulse kit, or $19.95 for a standard vending reader, including service, plus the same 5.95%, on a 36-month commitment per device. Micro-market kiosks are rented from $119 a month. Cantaloupe has been owned by 365 Retail Markets since 8 May 2026, when the merger closed and Cantaloupe stopped being a listed company; as of 2 October 2026 its website and store still use the Cantaloupe name and the prices above.
Nayax publishes prices for its VPOS Touch reader in its US online shop. The VPOS Touch reader costs $399 each for one to four units, $314 for five to 14 and $289 for 15 to 40, plus a $20 activation fee and a "Cashless, Operations & Inventory" package of $9.99 a month. Its laundry page lists the monthly service as $7.95 to $9.99 depending on the package.
The processing fee depends on what you sell. Nayax's shop asks for the lowest and highest product price in the machine and quotes a rate from them. In our tests on 2 October 2026, any machine whose cheapest item was under $5 was quoted 5.95% with no fixed fee, and one whose cheapest item was $5 or more was quoted 2.5% + 10 cents. Nayax's separate NayaxRun retail plan is $99 a month, with no processing fee on the first $5,000 of monthly sales and 2.5% + 10 cents above that.
Stripe supports unattended payments in the US on one reader, the Verifone UX700, and gives parking garages, car washes and self-serve kiosks as examples. Pricing is its standard in-person rate of 2.7% + 5 cents; the UX700 price is not published. Square's Mobile Payments SDK, the route for building Square payments into your own iOS or Android app, says using it "in unattended terminals or unattended kiosks is strictly prohibited" and gives an outdoor vending machine as the example. Payroc says it has more than 107,000 unattended devices deployed, sold through software partners, and its unattended page lists no prices.
Every card payment carries interchange, the fee the cardholder's bank receives, set by the card networks. For small purchases the networks publish special small-ticket rates. Here is what interchange alone comes to on a $1.50 snack, before any network or provider fees:
That last line is the problem. A debit card from a bank with $10 billion or more in assets is covered by the federal Durbin cap, which is mostly a fixed fee. On a vending sale that makes it the most expensive card a customer can tap. The cap has not changed: the Federal Reserve's 2023 proposal to lower it has not been adopted, and we cover the litigation over it separately.
A flat 5.95% is about 9 cents on $1.50, which is more than the interchange on most credit cards and less than half the interchange on a large-bank debit card. The provider is betting on the mix. For comparison, Stripe's standard 2.7% + 5 cents comes to about 9 cents on the same sale too. The fixed 5 cents does the work that the higher percentage does at Cantaloupe and Nayax.
The picture flips as prices rise. On a $5 car-wash vacuum cycle, 5.95% is about 30 cents and Nayax's 2.5% + 10 cents is 22.5 cents. On a $20 wash, 5.95% is $1.19 and 2.5% + 10 cents is 60 cents, which is why Nayax quotes a different rate for higher-priced machines. Cantaloupe's store lists 5.95% on every reader.
Take a snack machine that sells 200 items a month at $1.50, all by card, on a Cantaloupe reader bought outright for $329. Card sales are $300 a month. Processing at 5.95% is $17.85, the basic service fee is $9.95, and together they are $27.80 a month, or 9.3% of card sales, before the cost of the reader. Over the 12-month commitment that is $333.60 in fees plus $329 for the hardware. On a machine that sells a $3 item instead, the same fees are 7.6% of card sales, because the monthly fee is spread over twice the revenue.
The monthly fee is the part that hurts a quiet machine. Before you put a reader on every unit, compare the monthly fee to the card sales each machine actually does. A $9.95 fee is 3.3% of $300 a month in card sales and almost 10% of $100.
The card networks treat a machine with no staff as a different kind of terminal, and some of the rules land on you.
Publicly accessible EV chargers funded under Title 23 of the US Code, including the NEVI program, must, unless charging is free, provide "a contactless payment method that accepts major debit and credit cards", plus an automated toll-free number or SMS option, and must not require a membership to use. The rule, 23 CFR 680.106, has been in force since 30 March 2023. When an EV charger authorizes before charging, Mastercard's rules require it to show the estimated authorization amount and get the customer's consent. If the final charge is lower, the excess must be reversed, or the transaction cleared, within 24 hours.
If you also run attended sites, our guide to Tap to Pay on a phone covers what that costs where a member of staff is present.
