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payments operations

ACH costs a fraction of a card swipe — here's the math for your portfolio

Kevin

Most self-storage operators don’t read the fine print on payment processing. You sign up for a management platform, accept whatever payment integration it ships with, and move on. That’s understandable — there’s a lot to manage. But there’s a quiet cost buried in how some platforms price ACH (bank-transfer) payments that’s worth one coffee break to understand.

What ACH should cost

ACH transfers are cheap — the network was built for volume, not margin. Stripe’s ACH rate is 0.8%, capped at $5 per transaction. On a $100/month unit, that’s 80 cents. Compare a standard card transaction at 2.9% + $0.30 — $3.20 on that same $100. If you can nudge tenants toward ACH, the savings stack up fast.

The catch: how some platforms price ACH

Many integrated platforms charge a single blended rate across every payment type. In practice that means a bank transfer can be billed at something close to a card rate — and the difference between that and ACH’s true cost is margin the platform keeps. It rarely shows up on your statement, because your line items show gross collections, not per-transaction economics. Since every method is billed the same, there’s no obvious comparison point.

The math on your own portfolio

You don’t need a competitor’s numbers to see it — just compare card to ACH side by side. On a $100 unit: a card payment costs about $3.20, an ACH payment about $0.80. Multiply across your tenant base and shift more of them to autopay-by-ACH, and your single largest payment cost falls — often substantially as ACH adoption climbs toward the autopay-first norm.

How UnitFull prices payments

UnitFull charges transparent, flat published rates: ACH is 0.8%, capped at $5 per transaction, and card is 2.9% + $0.30 — the same published rates for every operator, listed on the pricing page. Bringing your own Authorize.net or NMI merchant account is on our roadmap. The more tenants you move to autopay-by-ACH, the lower your largest payment cost — which is increasingly the default.