If you're here, you want a straight answer, not a pitch. These are the questions we actually hear. If yours isn't here, the fastest path is an email — we read every one.
Most processors use tiered or bundled pricing, which sounds simple but hides where your money actually goes. We use interchange-plus: you pay the real card network cost (interchange) plus a small, transparent markup starting at 0.15%. You see every line. No "qualified" vs "non-qualified" games. No surprise junk fees.
The practical result for most merchants is a 20-50% reduction in effective rate without changing a single thing about how you take payments.
That's our markup on top of interchange — the part that varies by processor. Interchange itself (what Visa, Mastercard, Amex charge) is fixed and non-negotiable. Every processor pays the same interchange on the same card.
Your total effective rate will be interchange + assessment (~0.14%) + our markup. For a typical retail merchant, that lands between 1.6% and 2.0%. Run the calculator for a specific estimate.
No. No statement fee. No monthly minimum. No batch fee. No PCI non-compliance fee for compliant merchants. No annual fee. No early termination fee.
The only costs are the per-transaction rate (interchange + assessment + our markup) and any hardware you buy once, upfront.
It depends on what you need. Standalone terminals start around $199. Mobile readers are $49. Handheld POS systems run $299-$599. E-commerce and virtual terminal are free — they're software.
All hardware is sold outright, not leased. We don't lease. Leasing is how processors make back the money they're "saving" you on rates.
Three things. One: we process your credit card transactions at interchange-plus rates that are transparent and usually much lower than what you're paying now. Two: we audit your old processor statements to find reserves and credit card splits you're owed, and recover them. Three: we put an AI layer on top of every transaction to catch fraud, predict chargebacks, and automate your reconciliation.
Most merchants come for service one, stay for all three.
Send your last three months of processing statements to info@starlightlane.org. Within three business days you'll get a one-page audit report and proposal with exact numbers — your current cost, our proposed cost, and any credit card splits we spotted.
If you want to move forward, we handle the application, approval, and switchover. If you don't, you keep the audit. It's free either way.
Most merchants are approved in 24 hours after signing. Hardware ships the same day as approval. Depending on what you need, you're usually processing on the new account within 48-72 hours.
E-commerce merchants with virtual terminal or API integration are often live same-day.
Usually, yes. We work with most major POS systems and gateways already on the market — Clover, Square (some setups), Lightspeed, Toast, Shopify, WooCommerce, and dozens more.
If your current hardware is leased from your processor, that's trickier, because the lease is usually tied to their processing. We'll advise on the cleanest path.
No. You keep processing on your current account until the day we cut over, and then you start processing on ours. There's no overlap period where cards don't work.
We do the cutover on a scheduled day you choose — usually an evening or slow morning — and the entire handoff takes under 30 minutes in practice.
Many merchants are still under contract with their current processor and don't know it — or do know it, but assume the early termination fee (ETF) makes switching not worth it. Send us your contract. Most ETFs are $295-$495. Our merchants usually recoup that amount in the first month of savings.
Our contract is month-to-month. You can leave anytime, for any reason, with no fee. We'll even help you migrate to whoever's next.
No. Your business bank account stays exactly the same. Your deposits continue uninterrupted — just coming from us instead of your old processor.
Default funding is T+1 (next business day after the transaction). Same-day funding is available for qualifying merchants at no extra cost.
A credit card split (also called a reserve) is money your processor keeps from your deposits as insurance against future chargebacks. Common when a business is new, has high chargeback volume, or processes high-ticket transactions.
They're often justified when set up — but they're also often overstated, forgotten about, or held long after they should've been released. We audit those accounts, push for release, and recover what's yours.
We audit your statements to identify the reserve, document your current chargeback ratio and financial posture, and then negotiate directly with your processor on your behalf. Most releases close within 30-60 days.
For terminated relationships where money was never returned, we file the required paperwork and pursue it — processors are legally required to return unclaimed funds but rarely advertise it.
Recovery works whether you're staying or leaving. We've recovered credit card splits from active accounts, terminated accounts, and accounts that changed hands due to processor mergers. The recovery is independent of whether you switch processing to us.
Many merchants use credit card splits as the first engagement and switch processing later — or never. Both are fine.
A percentage of what we actually recover, paid after the funds land in your account. If we recover nothing, you pay nothing.
The exact percentage depends on complexity — a simple reserve release on an active account is lower; chasing down an unclaimed balance from a processor that no longer exists is higher. You'll know the number before we start work.
Three practical things. First, it scores every transaction for fraud risk in real time — blocks the obvious bad actors without adding friction to good customers. Second, it flags transactions likely to be disputed in the next 24 hours, so you can refund or intervene before a chargeback lands. Third, it auto-matches your deposits to invoices and tags tax lines, which cuts reconciliation work by most of a week per month.
No. The AI layer is opt-in per feature. Plenty of merchants come to us purely for lower processing rates and don't touch the AI dashboard. Others use fraud scoring and nothing else. Others use the whole suite.
We don't charge extra for the AI layer if you're a processing customer. It's included.
No. Each merchant gets their own model trained on their own data. Your fraud scoring learns your customers' behavior patterns — not a shared dataset.
We don't sell your data. We don't share it with advertising networks. We don't train generic systems on it. It's your data; we're just the pattern-recognition layer.
Yes. PCI-DSS Level 1, the highest compliance tier. Audited annually by an independent third party. Our platform handles the PCI scope so you don't have to.
For most merchants using our hardware or hosted checkout, your business qualifies for PCI Self-Assessment Questionnaire A (the easiest category) because the card data never touches your systems.
Card data is encrypted at the point of capture (hardware or browser) and tokenized. The only people who ever see raw PANs are the card networks themselves. We store tokens, not cards.
AES-256 encryption at rest and in transit. TLS 1.3 for all network traffic. Keys rotated on a regular schedule.
Yes. We're SOC 2 Type II audited. Reports are available under NDA for prospective and current customers who request them — email info@starlightlane.org with "SOC 2 request" in the subject line.
If your question isn't on this page, we want to hear it. Send an email, book a call, or text us your actual processing statement — whatever's easiest. Every question gets a human reply, usually same day.