Follow what happened next, because it is the whole page in one sequence. The merchant asked for statements demonstrating they were being charged the correct rate. The company, per the complaint, refused, asserted the rates were correct, and when pressed, sent random data that did not answer the question, telling the merchant they could calculate it themselves from what was provided. The merchant did. Their calculation showed overcharges. The company’s documented reply: as they are not an accounting firm, they do not need to explain the charges to their customers. Read that sentence twice, from a processor whose entire brand is pricing transparency. In our professional opinion, this is the most important specimen in this company’s file, not because the glitch existed, glitches happen, but because the response to verification is where a processor shows you its actual policy. An honest billing error, acknowledged, is corrected with statements and a refund. A billing error defended with refused documentation, decoy data, and a declaration that explanation is not owed, is not an error anymore. And the practical lesson generalizes to every merchant on any processor: the bill’s accuracy is not the processor’s department. It is yours, or it is nobody’s.

To understand why this model exists, understand the industry that produced it. There are thousands of ISOs, independent sales organizations, the companies that sell merchant processing, and here is the secret the brochures cannot say out loud: they are all buying substantially the same service at substantially the same buy rates. When every competitor’s cost is identical, differentiation is a marketing assignment, and the marketing department’s answer is to invent a pricing brand: wholesale pricing, which does not exist, because interchange is not a wholesale price anyone gets special access to, it is the same cost every processor on earth pays; or a membership fee, which converts the markup into a number that feels transparent precisely because it is impossible to evaluate. That is the trick, and in our professional opinion it is the most sophisticated one on this board: you can see exactly what you paid, a simple flat rate, and you cannot calculate what it meant. Did you pay 2 basis points over the true cost of your transactions? On the accounts we audit, we would say with great confidence you paid closer to twenty times that, and had no idea, because the model is engineered so that the one number that matters, your markup over true cost, is the one number the statement cannot show you. A price you can see but cannot evaluate is not transparency. It is legibility wearing transparency’s clothes.

Under Rule 6, price level is a fee practice, and under Rule 9 our audit files are evidence. This finding costs Stax one point in Fee Practices and two in Corporate Transparency.

No FTC actions, state attorney general enforcement, class actions, or card network fines against Stax or Fattmerchant were located. Full marks under the formula, with the caveat that now travels with every clean docket on this board: a decade-old private company’s empty courthouse file and the complaint record documented below are two different measurements of the same business, and the next four categories are where this company’s documented record actually lives.

The distribution is genuinely split, and the score reflects both halves. Credit: a 3.6 Trustpilot average across 1,200+ reviews with support staff praised by name is a better testimonial record than most of this board can show. Deductions: the documented themes run severe, post-cancellation drafting across multiple independent accounts, billing on undelivered equipment, the misclassification account above, transaction limits documented blocking legitimate sales and triggering customers’ bank fraud flags, a chargeback dispute where submitted proof of services rendered was, per the merchant, mishandled, and an applicant denied without stated reason after full document submission. Resolution scores low for a specific documented reason: the company visibly responds to complaints, but the responses preserved in the record are condolence form letters, and the substantive requests inside the complaints, statements, refunds, return labels, went unmet per the accounts. Responding is not resolving, and this category has always scored the second one.

Published subscription pricing earns some credit here, and the Fattmerchant-to-Stax rename is clean and well documented, but the audit-files finding above caps the pricing credit: a published number that defeats calculation of your markup over true cost is disclosure of the payment, not of the price, and this category measures whether a merchant can answer what they actually pay. The deductions: private ownership with no public disclosure; the documented two-portal architecture that partitions fee visibility away from the working interface; and the defining communication specimen of the file, a company that, asked to demonstrate its own billing was correct, refused the statements, supplied noise, and disclaimed the obligation to explain. Transparency is not what a company publishes about its prices. It is what a company produces when a customer checks the math, and on the documented record, the checking was treated as the problem.

Is Stax a good processor? Based on the documented record, Stax scored 53 out of 100 under the published weAudit Rating Methodology, a band reserved for companies whose documented record warrants extreme caution: merchant-friendly contract terms, no ETF, month-to-month, set against documented billing misclassification defended with refused statements, fees arriving uninformed, post-cancellation drafting across multiple accounts, a stated position that explaining the charges is not the company’s obligation, and, from our own audit files, a membership model that more often than not cost more than a pure interchange-plus deal while making that comparison nearly impossible to run. The gateway menu is broader than most, the contract is honest, and the price is the finding.

Three things to do this week: