Dojo Review

Dojo is the trading name of Paymentsense Limited, a London company incorporated in 2008 that grew into one of the UK's largest card-terminal resellers before rebuilding itself, from 2020, as a cloud-native acquirer under the Dojo brand. It now holds its own acquiring licence rather than reselling Fiserv's, and by its own filings handled £46.2bn of card volume for roughly 146,000 merchant locations in the year to March 2025 — a share it puts at 12.5% of UK small-business card-present acquiring. The pitch is simple: a fast card machine, money in your account the next day including weekends and bank holidays, integration with more than 450 EPOS systems, and a UK phone line. For businesses turning over less than £100,000 a year on cards there is a published Fix plan at £39.99 a month covering the first £3,999 of monthly card turnover, with 1% above that. Everyone larger gets a quote. Independent satisfaction is strong — 4.2 on Trustpilot from 5,612 reviews, 88% of them five-star — and the company is FCA-authorised. Against that sit a 12-month minimum term with the remaining terminal fees payable if you leave early, custom pricing that cannot be benchmarked, a fee schedule with £28 chargebacks and a £15-a-month PCI non-compliance charge, and a balance sheet carrying £649m of net debt at a 14% effective interest rate.

From reseller to acquirer

Dojo is a trading name of Paymentsense Limited, incorporated in London in October 2008 and, through the 2010s, one of the UK's biggest independent sales organisations — a company that sold card terminals and contracts to small businesses while the acquiring itself was done by First Data. That model built a large merchant base and, judging by the forum threads of the period, a reputation for contracts that ran longer than the salesperson had implied. In 2020 the company launched Dojo, a new brand on a cloud-native platform of its own, and according to analysis of its filed accounts by the trade publication Business of Payments, it obtained its own acquiring licence rather than continuing to rely on Fiserv. The Trustpilot profile was claimed in October 2020; FinTech Futures dates the platform's launch to 2021. By the year to March 2025 Paymentsense reported £455m of revenue, £46.2bn of card volume and roughly 146,000 merchant locations, and it describes its share of UK small-business card-present acquiring as 12.5%.

That transition is the most important fact about Dojo for a merchant. A reseller's customer has two counterparties — the sales company and an acquiring bank they never chose — and the fees that matter sit under the contract they did not negotiate. Dojo's customer has one. The settlement is Dojo's own, which is what makes next-day payouts seven days a week possible, and the complaint, if there is one, goes to the company that actually holds the money. Paymentsense Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 738728) and licensed under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011 (FRN 900925), and its complaints policy points to the Financial Ombudsman Service.

What it costs

A caveat first. Dojo's website sits behind bot protection that refused every automated request made for this review, including to the pricing page. The figures below are taken from an archived copy of that page captured in September 2025, from Dojo's own published fee schedule (version 1.4) and operating guide (March 2025), and from third-party UK guides updated between February and June 2026 that report the same plan structure. One guide updated in September 2026 describes a different structure — a 1.2% blended rate plus 5p per authorisation for sub-£100k businesses — which we could not reconcile with any Dojo document and record here as a discrepancy. Treat everything in this section as accurate to those sources and confirm it against the live page before signing.

Dojo sells three plans by annual card turnover. Fix, for businesses under £100,000 a year, is £39.99 a month covering the first £3,999 of monthly card turnover, with a 1% flat rate on everything above that; American Express is included, the platform fee is built into the monthly price, and the term is twelve months at a locked price. Flex, for businesses over £100,000, has negotiated debit, credit and secure-transaction rates, a £10-a-month platform fee per location, and a choice between a 30-day rolling plan and a 12-month price-locked one. Pro, for businesses over £1m a year, is fully bespoke. Hardware is either rented — from £15 a month, but only for businesses with £100,000 or more of annual card turnover — or bought outright, with the archived page quoting from £179 and 2026 guides listing the Dojo Go Max at £149, the Dojo Wired at £179 and the Dojo Pocket at £239. Tap to Pay on iPhone costs nothing in hardware.

The Fix plan deserves a moment's arithmetic, because whether it is cheap depends entirely on volume. At £3,999 of monthly card turnover, £39.99 is exactly 1%, and above that the marginal rate is 1% — genuinely competitive against Square's 1.75% or SumUp's 1.69% in person. At £2,000 a month it is 2%, still fine. At £1,000 a month it is 4%, and at £500 it is 8%, because the £39.99 is due whether or not you take a payment. A business doing under about £1,500 a month on cards is better off on a pay-as-you-go reader, and Dojo's own pricing structure says as much by aiming Fix at businesses that will use the allowance.

The fee schedule is where the rest of the cost lives. Cards issued outside the UK carry surcharges on top of the agreed rate: +0.05% for an EEA card presented in person, +0.15% for an EEA card online, +0.95% plus 13p for a non-EEA card in person, and +1.45% plus 13p for a non-EEA card online. Diners and Discover cards are 1.99%. Chargebacks are £28 plus VAT each. Not attesting PCI compliance costs £15 plus VAT a month, paper billing £3.50, a failed direct debit £15, arrears administration £10, changing the legal entity on the account £25, and a damaged or unreturned terminal up to £400 plus VAT per machine. Most of these are avoidable and none is unusual for the UK market, but a merchant who has only seen the £39.99 headline should read the schedule before assuming that is the whole bill.

The contract

Dojo's standard term is twelve months, after which the agreement rolls monthly and one month's written notice — by email or by post to its Bristol office — ends it, with Dojo arranging a courier to collect the card machine. There is a 30-day no-commitment trial at the start. The line that matters is in the fee schedule under early account closure: on a minimum-term agreement, closing early means paying the remaining card-machine service fees for the rest of the term. Dojo's website does not use the phrase early termination fee, and the FAQ says only that cancellation terms depend on which plan you are on, but the effect is the same as one. A merchant six months into a twelve-month Fix plan should expect to owe roughly six months of fees to leave.

Against that, Dojo offers to pay part or all of the exit fees a merchant owes its current provider when switching — up to £500 on the fixed-rate plan and up to £3,000 on bespoke rates. That is a standard tactic among UK acquirers and a useful one, but it is worth seeing the symmetry: a company that will pay £3,000 to get you out of a rival's contract is confident it will recover that over the term of its own.

The product, and what merchants say

The hardware and software are Dojo's clearest strength. The Dojo Go is a 4G portable terminal that the company, citing a 2023 Savanta study it commissioned, says authorises payments 58% faster than the market average; the Pocket combines order-taking and payment for table service; the Wired is a countertop and kiosk unit; and Tap to Pay on iPhone covers a new merchant while the terminal is in the post. Underneath is an integration layer connecting to more than 450 EPOS systems, an app with real-time transactions, daily totals, team permissions and terminal management, point-to-point encryption, and a two-step PCI attestation. Support is a UK line — account support 8am to 6pm, technical support 8am to 11pm — with remote access to the terminal to fix problems without a visit.

The independent record is unusually good for a UK terminal provider. Dojo's Trustpilot profile, read on 11 September 2026, shows 4.2 from 5,612 reviews, with 88% five-star and 7% one-star, 810 reviews in the last twelve months, and a 94% reply rate to negative reviews. The profile carries a paid Trustpilot subscription and Trustpilot notes that the company invites customers to review, which inflates volume rather than sentiment; what stands out is how specific the praise is, with reviewers naming individual sales and support staff and describing set-up in days. The negative reviews cluster around two things: applications declined by automated underwriting with no explanation and no route to a manual review, and disagreements about payment timing and holds. Trustpilot ranks Dojo 15th of 17 in its card-processing category despite the score, which mostly reflects how the ranking weights volume and recency.

The balance sheet

Dojo is a large, fast-growing company that has never made a pre-tax profit and is carrying a lot of debt. Business of Payments, reading Paymentsense's accounts for the year to March 2025, reports revenue up 11% to £455m, an operating profit of £17m, finance costs of £92.6m, a pre-tax loss of £75m, net debt of £649m at an effective interest rate of about 14%, leverage of 6.6 times EBITDA and accumulated losses of £720m. Merchant numbers were flat at about 146,000 while volume per merchant rose 9% to £314,000. In 2025 Vitruvian Partners invested $190m — described as the first equity raise in the company's history — to fund expansion into Ireland, Italy and Spain, where Dojo already operates.

For a merchant the direct risk from this is modest: card settlement runs through regulated channels, the company is FCA-supervised, and 146,000 merchant locations is a franchise a lender would rather refinance than liquidate. The indirect effect is on pricing behaviour. A company paying 14% on £650m of debt needs margin, and the way an acquirer gets margin from small merchants is through negotiated rates that drift up, ancillary fees, and terms that keep customers in place. That is the lens through which to read a Dojo quote.

The verdict

B. Dojo has done the hard thing in UK small-business payments — built its own acquiring platform rather than reselling somebody else's — and the result is a product that merchants demonstrably like: fast terminals, next-day money seven days a week, deep EPOS integration and a UK support line that reviewers praise by name. It publishes a small-business price where most of its rivals publish nothing, and it is properly regulated.

It stops at B because the commercial terms ask more trust than the product needs to. Most merchants are on unpublished negotiated rates, the twelve-month term carries a real early-closure cost that the website does not name, the fee schedule has a long tail, and the company behind it is leveraged in a way that rewards squeezing margin. The rational approach is to want the product and negotiate the contract: get the full fee schedule alongside the headline rate, choose the 30-day rolling option on Flex if you qualify, confirm the early-closure calculation in writing, and use the 30-day trial for what it is.