Why your payment processor is quietly charging you card rates on ACH
Most self-storage operators don’t read the fine print on payment processing. They 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 handle ACH — bank-transfer payments — that’s worth at least one coffee break to understand.
What ACH is supposed to cost
ACH transfers are cheap. The network was built for volume, not margin. Stripe’s current ACH rate is 0.8% — capped at $5 per transaction. For a $100/month storage unit, that’s 80 cents.
Compare that to a standard credit card transaction at 2.9% + $0.30: $3.20 for that same $100 payment.
If you can nudge tenants toward ACH, the savings stack up fast.
What some FMS platforms actually charge
Here’s where it gets frustrating.
Storable (the umbrella that includes storEDGE, SiteLink, and their other products) charges a blended rate across all payment types. That rate is 2.9% — the same as a card transaction.
So when a tenant pays via ACH, Storable collects Stripe’s actual cost (0.8%), pockets the remaining 2.1%, and passes $2.90 per $100 to you as the effective processing cost.
That spread is their margin, paid by you, on every bank transfer.
The math for a reference operator
Take a 5-facility, 2,500-unit operation. Average rent of $120/month/unit. If 40% of tenants pay by ACH:
| Monthly collections | $300,000 |
| ACH volume (40%) | $120,000 |
| Storable blended cost | $3,480/mo |
| Stripe ACH pass-through | $960/mo |
| Monthly difference | $2,520/mo |
That’s $30,240/year extracted on ACH transactions alone — before a single card is charged.
The bigger your ACH adoption rate, the larger this spread. Operators who’ve pushed autopay adoption to 60–70% face a proportionally larger gap.
Why operators miss it
Processor pricing is buried in platform agreements. The line items you see on your statement show gross collections, not the per-transaction economics. And since everyone pays the same rate regardless of payment method, there’s no obvious comparison point.
The only way to see it clearly is to read the full fee schedule and compare it against what Stripe actually charges for ACH — which most operators don’t do.
What “pass-through pricing” means
UnitFull uses Stripe with full pass-through pricing: we don’t mark up transaction fees. ACH costs 0.8% (plus Stripe’s standard cap). Card costs Stripe’s published card rates. We make our margin on the platform fee, not on your payment volume.
This isn’t altruistic. It’s a simpler model to explain and a better deal for operators with high ACH adoption — which, increasingly, is the default for autopay-first facilities.
Pricing data sourced from MARKETING_PRICING_DATA.md §3. Storable blended rate is a published figure; individual contracts may vary. Last verified: 2026-05-12.