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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. Prefer your own arrangement? Bring your own merchant account (Authorize.net / NMI) and run payments through it. Either way, the more tenants you move to autopay-by-ACH, the lower your largest payment cost — which is increasingly the default.