New York, New York, United StatesFact-checked September 4, 2026
CardFlight (SwipeSimple) Review
B-CardFlight is a New York software company, founded in 2013 by Derek Webster, whose product SwipeSimple is the payment-acceptance app a great many American small businesses use without ever hearing the name CardFlight. That is by design: CardFlight has historically sold through banks, merchant acquirers and independent sales organisations, which rebrand or resell SwipeSimple to their own merchants, and the company says ten of the top thirty US merchant acquirers and ISOs have selected it as their preferred small-business acceptance product. It reports more than 125,000 small businesses on the platform as of August 2026. Alongside that channel business it now sells direct, as SwipeSimple Connect, with fully published pricing: 2.6% plus 10 cents in person, 3.5% plus 10 cents keyed, no monthly, annual, batch, statement or PCI fees, no contract, a $49 mobile reader and a $299 smart terminal. WestView Capital Partners took a growth stake in October 2024.
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- Rate from
- 3.5% plus $0.10 per transaction on SwipeSimple Connect for card-not-present volume — keyed entry, invoices and payment links. If you were sold SwipeSimple by a bank, acquirer or ISO rather than by CardFlight, your rate is theirs and bears no necessary relationship to this one.
- Monthly
- None on SwipeSimple Connect.
- Payout
- About two business days.
- Contract
- None on SwipeSimple Connect.
- Founded
- 2013
Connect with CardFlight (SwipeSimple)
Tell them what you need. This goes to CardFlight (SwipeSimple) only.
Best for
Mobile and field businesses that take cards away from a counter — trades, mobile services, market stalls, delivery, in-home appointments — and small retailers who want a real terminal without a software subscription. The direct SwipeSimple Connect offer suits anyone who wants pay-as-you-go pricing with no monthly minimum, and Tap to Pay on iPhone makes it viable with no hardware at all. It is also a sensible pick for merchants who already have a merchant account through a bank or ISO and want better acceptance software on top of it.
How it scores
Pricing3.5
Features3.0
Ease of use4.5
Support1.5
Contract4.0
Reputation score2.5
What it costs
Details →- Online
- 3.5% plus $0.10 per transaction on SwipeSimple Connect for card-not-present volume — keyed entry, invoices and payment links. If you were sold SwipeSimple by a bank, acquirer or ISO rather than by CardFlight, your rate is theirs and bears no necessary relationship to this one.
- Monthly
- None on SwipeSimple Connect.
- Chargeback
- $15 on SwipeSimple Connect.
What others rate them
Details →- BBB
- 1.5
- TRUSTPILOT
- 2.1
The takeB-
SwipeSimple is a good piece of software with two very different commercial faces, and which one you meet decides what this review is worth to you. Bought direct as SwipeSimple Connect, the published pricing is clean and competitive, there is no contract and no monthly fee, and the hardware is cheap — for a mobile or low-volume merchant that is a straightforwardly good deal. Bought through a reseller, the app is the same and the economics are whatever that reseller decided, which is where most of the complaints about surprise monthly charges and fund holds come from. B- reflects a solid product carrying a poor public service record: a D- from the Better Business Bureau for failing to respond to complaints, and a Trustpilot page that is small but overwhelmingly negative.
Skip if you
You need heavy retail or restaurant functionality — deep inventory, table management, coursing, multi-location reporting — because SwipeSimple is deliberately light. Skip the reseller route entirely if you cannot get the full fee schedule in writing: the app you are buying is the same one sold direct at 2.6% plus 10 cents, so an ISO quoting you monthly fees, PCI fees and a term should have to justify them. And treat CardFlight's complaint record seriously if your business could not absorb a hold on a large batch.
Chapter 1
Should you choose CardFlight (SwipeSimple)?
The headline take, the audiences it's right (and wrong) for, and the genuine differentiators behind the verdict.
About
CardFlight is a New York software company, founded in 2013 by Derek Webster, whose product SwipeSimple is the payment-acceptance app a great many American small businesses use without ever hearing the name CardFlight. That is by design: CardFlight has historically sold through banks, merchant acquirers and independent sales organisations, which rebrand or resell SwipeSimple to their own merchants, and the company says ten of the top thirty US merchant acquirers and ISOs have selected it as their preferred small-business acceptance product. It reports more than 125,000 small businesses on the platform as of August 2026. Alongside that channel business it now sells direct, as SwipeSimple Connect, with fully published pricing: 2.6% plus 10 cents in person, 3.5% plus 10 cents keyed, no monthly, annual, batch, statement or PCI fees, no contract, a $49 mobile reader and a $299 smart terminal. WestView Capital Partners took a growth stake in October 2024.
Pros, cons, and audience
Pros
- SwipeSimple Connect publishes a complete price list: 2.6% plus 10 cents in person, 3.5% plus 10 cents keyed, and explicitly no setup, monthly, annual, batch, statement or PCI fees.
- No long-term contract on the direct plan, so no term to serve and no early-termination fee — a rarity for a product distributed largely through ISOs.
- Hardware is cheap and bought outright: $49 for the mobile reader and $299 for the smart terminal, with no lease and no equipment financing to unwind later.
- Tap to Pay on iPhone means a merchant can start accepting contactless cards with no hardware at all, which is the fastest possible path to acceptance for a mobile business.
- Settlement is typically within two business days, and next-business-day funding is offered to qualified merchants at no extra charge rather than as a paid upgrade.
- Genuine scale and distribution credibility: more than 125,000 small businesses as of August 2026, and CardFlight says ten of the top thirty US merchant acquirers and ISOs have picked SwipeSimple as their preferred small-business acceptance product.
- The product is still being invested in — a growth investment from WestView Capital Partners in October 2024, an app marketplace in March 2026, and ACH payments powered by Nuvei in August 2026.
- The app is genuinely simple. For a merchant whose staff turn over and whose training budget is nil, that is a feature that outranks most feature lists.
Cons
- The Better Business Bureau rates SwipeSimple D-, attributing it to failure to respond to five complaints. Whatever the merits of the individual complaints, non-response is a choice the company makes.
- Most merchants do not buy from CardFlight. They buy from a bank, acquirer or ISO that resells SwipeSimple with its own rates, monthly fees and contract — so the published 2.6% may have nothing to do with what you pay, and CardFlight is not the party you can renegotiate with.
- Complaints in the public record centre on unexpected monthly service charges and held funds. Held funds in particular are decided by the acquirer behind your account, which on a reseller deal is a company you may never have been told the name of.
- The feature set is deliberately shallow. There is no serious inventory management, no restaurant functionality, no multi-location reporting — if you outgrow a card reader and a catalogue, you outgrow SwipeSimple.
- 3.5% plus 10 cents for keyed, invoice and payment-link transactions is high for a business that runs mostly card-not-present volume.
- The ACH software fee is waived only through 31 December 2026, so the long-run cost of the newest feature is unknown.
- Public reputation data is thin: 17 Trustpilot reviews for a platform with over 100,000 merchants tells you almost nothing statistically, which leaves the BBB file doing more work than it should have to.
- CardFlight's own materials disagree on its distribution claim — one page says ten of the top twenty-five US merchant acquirers, another says ten of the top thirty. Small, but it is the kind of figure a buyer should not have to reconcile.
What makes them different
The genuine differentiator
It is a payments software company that mostly does not own the merchant relationship. CardFlight builds the acceptance layer and lets acquirers put their own economics and support around it, which is why the same product can reach you at 2.6% flat with no contract or wrapped in a monthly-fee agreement from a reseller. Knowing that CardFlight publishes its own direct price is the single most useful piece of leverage a SwipeSimple merchant has.
How we score it
3.5
Pricing Transparency
3
Feature Set
4.5
Ease of Use
1.5
Customer Support
4
Contract Terms
2.5
Industry Reputation
Chapter 2
What it costs
Real-world cost at three volumes, plus the rates, fees, payouts, and contract terms that drive them.
What CardFlight (SwipeSimple) actually costs
Estimated annual cost at three realistic processing volumes, using CardFlight (SwipeSimple)’s published online rate plus monthly fees. Real costs vary with average transaction size, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.
Small business
$10K/mo volume · ~$75 avg transaction
$4.4K/year
≈ $363/mo · 3.63% effective rate
Growing merchant
$50K/mo volume · ~$100 avg transaction
$22K/year
≈ $1.8K/mo · 3.60% effective rate
High volume
$250K/mo volume · ~$150 avg transaction
$107K/year
≈ $8.9K/mo · 3.57% effective rate
Pricing details
The company most of its merchants have never heard of
CardFlight is a software company that sells payment acceptance mostly through other people. Founded in New York in 2013 by Derek Webster, it built SwipeSimple — a card reader, a phone app, a dashboard and a virtual terminal — and then took it to market through the banks, acquirers and independent sales organisations that already had small-business relationships. The company says ten of the top thirty US merchant acquirers and ISOs have selected it as their preferred small-business acceptance product, and reports more than 125,000 small businesses on the platform as of August 2026.
That distribution model is the single most important fact about this review, because it means two merchants using identical software can be on wildly different commercial terms and neither of them is dealing with CardFlight.
SwipeSimple Connect: the price CardFlight charges
Alongside the channel business, CardFlight sells direct as SwipeSimple Connect, and here it publishes everything: 2.6% plus 10 cents for tap, dip and swipe, 3.5% plus 10 cents for keyed transactions, invoices and payment links, and an explicit list of fees that do not exist — no setup fee, no monthly fee, no annual fee, no batch fee, no statement fee, no PCI compliance fee. Chargebacks are $15. Refunds cost nothing to process, though the fees on the original sale are not returned.
Hardware is bought outright at $49 for the mobile reader or $299 for the smart terminal, with no lease. Settlement is typically within two business days, and next-business-day funding is offered free to qualified merchants rather than sold as an upgrade. There is no long-term contract. For a mobile business or a small retailer, that is a clean, competitive package with no trap in it.
And the price somebody else charges
If SwipeSimple arrived through your bank or a sales agent, none of the above applies. Your rate, your monthly fees, your PCI fee, your term and your funding speed were set by that reseller and its acquiring bank. This is where the complaints come from. The published BBB complaints describe monthly service charges the merchant did not expect and funds held without explanation — decisions that, in a reseller deal, are made by parties CardFlight does not control and the merchant may never have been introduced to.
The Better Business Bureau rates SwipeSimple D-, and attributes that rating specifically to a failure to respond to five complaints. That part is on CardFlight. The Trustpilot page is worse — 2.1 across 17 reviews — but seventeen reviews across a platform with over 100,000 merchants is not evidence of anything much; read it for themes, not for the score.
What is being built
The product is not standing still. WestView Capital Partners took a growth stake in October 2024. Tap to Pay on iPhone arrived for Worldpay merchants using SwipeSimple in October 2025. An app marketplace launched in March 2026, and SwipeSimple ACH — bank payments on invoices and payment links, powered by Nuvei — launched in August 2026 with the software fee waived through the end of the year. That waiver has an expiry date, which is a polite way of saying a fee is coming; confirm what it will be before you make ACH central to how you invoice.
How to buy it well
The most valuable thing a SwipeSimple merchant can know is that CardFlight publishes a direct price. If you are being quoted a monthly fee, a PCI fee and a three-year term for the same app CardFlight sells at 2.6% plus 10 cents with no contract, you are paying for the reseller, not the software — and you are entitled to ask what that is buying you. Sometimes the answer is a genuine local service relationship worth having. Often it is not.
Processing Rates
Online
3.5% plus $0.10 per transaction on SwipeSimple Connect for card-not-present volume — keyed entry, invoices and payment links. If you were sold SwipeSimple by a bank, acquirer or ISO rather than by CardFlight, your rate is theirs and bears no necessary relationship to this one.
Card-not-present, e-commerce, and online payments
In-person
2.6% plus $0.10 per transaction on SwipeSimple Connect for tap, dip and swipe. Accepts contactless including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay, and Tap to Pay on iPhone with no reader at all.
Card-present retail and point-of-sale transactions
Keyed
3.5% plus $0.10, the same as invoices and payment links.
Manually entered card-not-present transactions
Fees
Monthly Fee
None on SwipeSimple Connect.
Recurring monthly account fee
PCI Compliance Fee
None on SwipeSimple Connect.
Annual PCI DSS compliance and security fee
Statement Fee
SwipeSimple Connect publishes no setup fee, no monthly fee, no annual fee, no batch fee, no statement fee and no PCI compliance fee. Refunds carry no processing fee, though the fees on the original transaction are not returned. Hardware is bought outright: $49 for the mobile card reader and $299 for the smart terminal, before tax. All of this applies to the direct offer only — a reseller selling you the same app sets its own schedule, and the monthly service charges that appear in complaints about SwipeSimple generally originate there rather than with CardFlight.
Monthly account statement and reporting fee
Chargeback Fee
$15 on SwipeSimple Connect.
Per-incident chargeback dispute fee
Payouts
Standard Payout Time
About two business days.
Regular deposit schedule to your bank account
Expedited Payout Time
Next-day funding for qualified merchants, no extra charge.
Faster deposit option (may have additional fees)
Minimum Payout Amount
CardFlight states that settlement on SwipeSimple Connect typically occurs within two business days, with next-business-day funding available at no additional cost to merchants who qualify, subject to approval. As with the rates, funding timing on a reseller-sold account is set by that reseller and its acquirer, not by CardFlight.
Minimum balance required before payout
Contract Terms
Contract Length
None on SwipeSimple Connect.
Required commitment period
Cancellation Process
SwipeSimple Connect is sold with no long-term contract, so there is no term to serve and no early-termination fee — you stop processing and you are done, with the hardware already paid for outright. The caveat is the one that runs through this whole review: if SwipeSimple reached you through a bank, an acquirer or an ISO, the contract you signed is theirs. Check whether it carries a term, an auto-renewal, a monthly minimum or an early-termination clause, because none of those come from CardFlight.
How to terminate your account
CardFlight (SwipeSimple) Pricing Calculator
Estimate your monthly costs
Pick a published plan, enter your volume and transaction profile, and we’ll compute the math the same way an underwriter would. Real costs vary with card mix, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.
$
$
Estimated Monthly Cost
$370.00
Effective Rate
3.70%
Discount rate (3.5% × $10,000)$350.00
Per-transaction fees ($0.10 × 200)$20.00
Number of transactions200
Flat all-in rate (interchange built in)
Chapter 3
What you actually get
Products, integrations, payment-type coverage, security posture, and how their support holds up in practice.
Products & Services
mobile payments
SwipeSimple mobile app
iOS and Android app for taking card payments in the field, with an item catalogue, saved customer cards for faster repeat checkout, offline mode and receipts. This is the product most SwipeSimple merchants actually use.
mobile payments
Tap to Pay on iPhone
Contactless acceptance directly on an iPhone with no card reader. CardFlight announced availability for Worldpay merchants using SwipeSimple in October 2025, and it is offered on the direct SwipeSimple Connect plan.
pos
SwipeSimple card readers
The B250 Bluetooth reader supports EMV chip, magnetic stripe and NFC contactless including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Sold outright at $49 on SwipeSimple Connect.
pos
SwipeSimple Terminal
A countertop smart terminal for merchants who want a fixed device rather than a phone or tablet. $299 outright on SwipeSimple Connect.
virtual terminal
Virtual Terminal and invoicing
Browser-based keyed entry, invoices and payment links from the SwipeSimple dashboard, priced at the card-not-present rate of 3.5% plus $0.10 on the direct plan.
ach
SwipeSimple ACH
Bank-account payments on invoices and payment links, launched in August 2026 and powered by Nuvei. CardFlight has said it is waiving the SwipeSimple ACH software fee for all merchants through 31 December 2026, which implies a fee resumes after that date — worth confirming before you build a workflow on it.
other
SwipeSimple App Marketplace
A curated set of third-party business tools surfaced inside the SwipeSimple dashboard, launched in March 2026.
Support & Contact
Chapter 4
What others say
Synthesis of third-party platform reviews and industry ratings — agreements, disagreements, and which signals to weight.
Platform Ratings
Aggregated Trust Score
Based on 17 reviews across 2 rating platforms
1.8
out of 5
Overall Rating
Better Business Bureau
Reviewer Notes
The Better Business Bureau rates SwipeSimple D- and it is not accredited; the BBB attributes the rating to failure to respond to five complaints filed against the business. The file was opened in April 2023 and is registered to CardFlight's New York address. The published complaints concern unexpected monthly service charges, an NSF fee on an unrecognised debit, and held funds — a pattern that fits the reseller-distribution model as much as CardFlight itself, but the non-response is CardFlight's own.
Trustpilot
Reviewer Notes
A TrustScore of 2.1 across only 17 reviews, 82% of them one-star, with 14 posted in the last twelve months. Seventeen reviews is far too small a sample to characterise a platform serving over 100,000 merchants and should not be read as representative. It is worth reading anyway, because the themes match the BBB file exactly: charges the merchant did not expect, and funds held without a clear explanation.
Chapter 6
Common questions
Frequently Asked Questions
General
CardFlight, Inc. is the New York software company; SwipeSimple is its product. Founded in 2013 by Derek Webster, CardFlight builds the app, the readers and the dashboard, and has historically distributed them through banks, merchant acquirers and independent sales organisations rather than selling to merchants directly. SwipeSimple Connect is its own direct offer, sold at published rates.
Pricing
Features
Contracts & Terms
Setup & Onboarding
How we evaluated CardFlight (SwipeSimple)
We evaluate every payment processor independently — Payment Review does not accept paid placement. Our analysis combines hands-on product testing where possible, public pricing and policy documents, third-party reviews from BBB, Trustpilot, Google, and G2, and employee feedback from sites like Glassdoor and Indeed. We update reviews on a rolling cadence and flag the next review date so readers know how fresh the analysis is.
Last fact-checked September 4, 2026
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