Swipesum Review

Swipesum is a St. Louis payments advisory founded in 2016 by brothers Michael and Stephen Seaman, and it sells something most companies in this market do not: advice about the processor you already have. Its core work is the statement audit — running a merchant's monthly processing statement through its own software, called Staitment, to separate interchange from processor markup, identify what is negotiable, and quantify what is being overpaid. From there it will renegotiate with the incumbent, run a competitive process across a network it describes as more than seventy providers, and handle the implementation. It describes itself as a fractional chief payments officer rather than an independent sales organisation, and unusually for this corner of the industry it publishes actual prices: the evaluation and implementation service is free, enterprise consulting starts at $50 an hour, and a single statement analysis is $75. It claims to have analysed over $300.5 billion in processing volume since 2016, and it has made the Inc. 5000 three years running — No. 729 in 2023, No. 666 in 2024, and again in 2025.

An adviser, not a processor

Swipesum does not hold your merchant agreement and does not process your transactions. It reads your processing statement. Founded in St. Louis in 2016 by brothers Michael and Stephen Seaman, the firm's core work is auditing what a business already pays to accept cards — separating interchange, which is set by the card networks and is not negotiable, from the processor's markup, which is — and then either renegotiating with the incumbent or running a competitive process across a network it describes as more than seventy providers.

That is a genuinely useful thing to buy, because merchant statements are hard to read on purpose. Tiered pricing, bundled qualification categories and a dozen small line items are how markup hides, and most business owners have no reliable way to tell a legitimate pass-through cost from a margin. Swipesum built software for it, called Staitment, which parses a statement line by line and produces a cost comparison. The audit that would take an expert hours takes the software much less, which is what makes a $75 price for one possible.

It publishes prices, which is unusual enough to notice

Three prices are on Swipesum's public pricing page. The evaluation-through-implementation service — consultation, proposal, negotiation assistance, integration help and ongoing support — is free. Enterprise consulting is hourly, starting at $50. A single statement analysis is $75.

In merchant services this is close to unheard of. Almost every firm in this market quotes privately, prices bespoke, and treats the first published number as a negotiating loss. Putting an hourly rate on a website is a signal about how a firm expects to be judged, and it is the strongest single point in Swipesum's favour. It also makes the hourly consulting the cleanest thing it sells: you buy a defined number of hours, you get advice, and nobody has to be placed anywhere for the transaction to make sense.

The incentive question

Swipesum describes itself as a fractional chief payments officer and publishes material criticising the commission-driven independent sales organisation model. The distinction is real in what it will sell you — hourly advice with no placement, and a willingness to renegotiate with your existing processor rather than move you — and both of those are things a pure reseller has no reason to offer.

It is not a complete distinction, though. Swipesum earns from placing merchants with providers in its network, and it does not publish how: whether it takes a share of the residual stream on your account, a one-off payment from the processor, or both. That is the disclosure that would settle the question, and its absence is the main reason to stay alert rather than to stay away. The useful posture is to ask, on any specific recommendation, how the firm is paid if you take it — a straightforward question that a genuinely aligned adviser should welcome.

What can and cannot be verified

The claims are substantial. Over $300.5 billion in processing volume analysed since 2016. Over $30.5 billion consulted in 2025. Clients typically cutting their effective rate by 60% within 45 days of a first audit. None of these carries a methodology, a sample, or a definition — and the two volume figures are presented on the same site without enough definition to reconcile them against each other.

Independent evidence is limited but not absent. The Better Business Bureau rates the firm A+, though it is not accredited, so that reflects complaint history rather than a commitment to BBB standards. G2 reports 4.9 out of 5, but from only around twenty reviews, and its page could not be read directly for this review. Trustpilot shows 3.6 — from three reviews, none in the past twelve months, with the site itself flagging that the sample may not be representative. Inc. 5000 placements are the most meaningful outside signal, since those rankings are computed from submitted financials rather than from a company's own marketing: No. 729 in 2023, No. 666 in 2024 and a third consecutive listing in 2025. Worth noting that Swipesum's own homepage dates its listings to 2022, 2023 and 2024, which the announcements do not support — the first was 2023.

The 60% claim deserves one specific caution. A cut to an effective rate is not a cut to a bill, and how much room exists depends entirely on how badly a merchant is priced today. A business on a heavily marked-up tiered contract may well see a dramatic change; one already on a keen interchange-plus deal will not. The good news is that this is cheap to test — a $75 analysis, or the free evaluation — which makes the headline number largely beside the point.

Who should call them

Businesses with enough volume for a percentage point to be worth chasing, on interchange-plus or tiered pricing, with nobody in-house who can read a statement. Roughly $50,000 a month and upward is where the arithmetic starts working. Multi-location retailers, franchises and long-tenured merchant accounts that have never been renegotiated are the clearest candidates, and software companies weighing whether to become a payment facilitator are a good fit for the hourly work, because that decision is expensive to get wrong and cheap to get advice on.

If you are on Square, Stripe or PayPal flat-rate pricing, there is nothing here. Flat-rate pricing has no interchange markup layer to unpick; the audit will confirm what you already knew and the savings will not materialise.

The verdict

B. Swipesum sells a service worth buying, prices it publicly in an industry that does not, and offers a version — hourly consulting — with no placement attached at all. The statement audit is real work on a real problem, the software behind it is a sensible reason the price can be low, and three consecutive Inc. 5000 listings are the kind of corroboration most firms in this space cannot produce.

It does not grade higher because the things that would settle the case are missing. The savings claim is self-reported and undefined. The placement economics are undisclosed. And the independent review base — three on Trustpilot, around twenty on G2 — is too small to weigh against the firm's own account of itself. Use it, and use it well, by starting with the free evaluation or the $75 analysis, asking directly how it is paid on anything it recommends, and treating the hourly consulting as the part of the offering with the fewest strings attached.