A pay-as-you-go card reader and POS provider with flat published rates, no monthly fee and no contract. Strong for small and mobile sellers; the recurring complaint is account freezes and held funds with slow resolution.
Tell them what you need. This goes to SumUp only.
Sole traders, market and mobile sellers, cafes, salons, tradespeople and anyone processing modest volume who wants to take a card today without an application, a contract or a monthly bill.
SumUp is one of the few processors that publishes its whole rate card and asks you to sign nothing. In-person is 2.6% + 10 cents, online and keyed is 3.5% + 15 cents, there is no monthly fee on the pay-as-you-go plan and no early termination fee because there is no term. That combination is genuinely hard to find. The weakness is what happens when something goes wrong: SumUp underwrites merchants instantly and reviews them afterwards, so freezes, verification holds and delayed payouts are a recurring theme in its public reviews, and support is app-based rather than a named account manager.
You process high volume, where a flat 2.6% costs materially more than interchange-plus. Skip it too if a multi-day hold on your takings would be a serious problem, or if you are in a high-risk vertical — SumUp's terms exclude a long list of categories and the account is closed after the fact rather than declined up front.
The headline take, the audiences it's right (and wrong) for, and the genuine differentiators behind the verdict.
A pay-as-you-go card reader and POS provider with flat published rates, no monthly fee and no contract. Strong for small and mobile sellers; the recurring complaint is account freezes and held funds with slow resolution.
Almost everything is published. The rate, the absence of a monthly fee, the absence of a contract and the dispute policy all sit on the pricing page, which is unusual in an industry where the standard answer is 'apply and we'll quote you'.
Real-world cost at three volumes, plus the rates, fees, payouts, and contract terms that drive them.
Estimated annual cost at three realistic processing volumes, using SumUp’s published online rate plus monthly fees. Real costs vary with average transaction size, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.
SumUp launched in 2012 and is run out of London, and by its own count more than four million businesses now use it. The proposition is unusually simple for this industry: buy a reader, download the app, take a card. In the US the rate is 2.6% plus 10 cents in person, 3.5% plus 15 cents for online or manually keyed transactions, and 2.9% plus 15 cents when a customer pays an invoice through a SumUp link.
There is no monthly fee on pay-as-you-go, no monthly minimum, no term and no early termination fee. SumUp's pricing page also states it charges no additional fee for a dispute, which is genuinely rare — the industry norm is $15 to $25 per chargeback on top of the lost sale. If you have spent any time getting a quote out of a traditional processor, the ability to read the whole cost structure on one public page is the main thing SumUp is selling.
Flat pricing is a good deal at low volume and a bad one at high volume. 2.6% covers SumUp's cost, the card networks' interchange and its margin in a single number, which is convenient when you process $4,000 a month and expensive when you process $60,000. Somewhere in between — the crossover typically falls in the mid five figures a month, though it depends heavily on your card mix — an interchange-plus arrangement from a conventional processor starts to win, and the saving outgrows the paperwork.
Card-not-present is the weaker half of the offer. At 3.5% plus 15 cents, an ecommerce or invoice-heavy business will pay noticeably more than it would on a processor built for online, so SumUp is best read as an in-person product with online capability attached rather than a general-purpose gateway.
The consistent complaint against SumUp, across thousands of public reviews, is not price — it is held funds. Accounts are frozen for verification, payouts stall, and merchants describe app-based support as slow to escalate. Trustpilot puts SumUp at roughly 4.1 out of 5 across tens of thousands of reviews — its regional listings show counts ranging from about 41,000 to over 54,000 — which is a good headline score, but the one-star share is substantial and clusters almost entirely on this theme.
The cause is structural rather than accidental. SumUp onboards instantly and underwrites afterwards, which is exactly what makes signup painless. The cost of that trade is that a business the risk team would have declined at application instead gets discovered mid-flight, with money already in the pipeline. If a week's takings sitting behind a review would put you in real difficulty, that risk is the thing to weigh, not the ten cents.
A market trader, a mobile groomer, a coffee cart, a one-chair salon, a tradesperson invoicing a handful of jobs a month: for all of these the arithmetic is easy and the absence of a contract removes the usual risk of choosing wrong. For a growing retailer with staff, stock and $50,000 a month going through the till, SumUp is the thing you eventually outgrow — which, to be fair, it never claimed otherwise.
Card-not-present, e-commerce, and online payments
Card-present retail and point-of-sale transactions
Manually entered card-not-present transactions
Cross-border and foreign currency transactions
Recurring monthly account fee
Per-incident chargeback dispute fee
Fee for canceling before contract end
Regular deposit schedule to your bank account
Faster deposit option (may have additional fees)
Required commitment period
No term. Pay-as-you-go with no monthly minimum; optional POS subscriptions are billed monthly
How to terminate your account
Stop using the account. There is no early termination fee because there is no committed term. Hardware carries a 30-day money-back guarantee from delivery on SumUp's US store.
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.
Flat all-in rate (interchange built in)
Products, integrations, payment-type coverage, security posture, and how their support holds up in practice.
Bluetooth and standalone card readers taking chip, contactless and mobile wallets, paired with a free app. SumUp's US site lists readers starting at $99; the exact line-up and promotional pricing change frequently.
Cloud point of sale with product catalogue, reporting and staff tools, sold as a monthly subscription on top of the same transaction rate.
Marketing and customer-engagement add-on covering a customer database, rewards and SMS/email campaigns. Sold in Plus and Pro tiers.
Sending invoices is free; the customer paying through the SumUp link is charged at 2.9% + 15 cents.
2.6% + 10 cents for in-person card payments in the US, 3.5% + 15 cents for online payments and manually keyed entries, and 2.9% + 15 cents when a customer pays an invoice through a SumUp link. These are published rates, not quotes, and they do not vary by card type or volume.
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