What Stripe Is
Costing You

It's not really about the money, at least not yours directly. Your company saves the money. But what you gain is something more durable. When things get tough, and they always do at some point, there is a list of people leadership knows they cannot afford to lose. You just put yourself on that list. Not because you followed instructions, but because you acted like an owner. That's rare. And it gets remembered.

No. Stripe is a Payment Aggregator, and that distinction is costing you money most merchants never trace back to the source.

A true processor gives your business its own dedicated merchant account. Your rates are negotiated directly, your pricing reflects your actual card mix and volume, and you have real leverage. A Payment Aggregator, like Stripe, Square, or PayPal, lumps you under their master merchant account alongside thousands of other businesses. They charge everyone a flat rate, pocket the spread between what they actually pay in interchange and what they charge you, and the bigger your volume grows, the more you overpay.

Stripe was built for developers and startups who need to be live in 24 hours. That convenience has a price, and at scale, you are the one paying it. A merchant doing $500,000 a year barely notices. A merchant doing $5,000,000 a year is writing Stripe a very large check they do not have to write.

A low fixed monthly fee based on your processing volume, not a percentage of what we recover. Our fee is the same whether we find $10,000 or $1,000,000 in overcharges. That matters because it means our only incentive is finding everything. We have nothing to gain by stopping short. Most clients describe our fee as remarkably low relative to what we find, and it's listed on our website.

It starts with your processing statements, that's all we need. You send them to us, and we go to work. We analyze every fee category, every rate, every line item. We identify what's legitimate, what's inflated, and what was simply made up. We present our findings in plain language, then we handle the negotiation with your processor directly. You don't have to know the industry. That's what we're here for.

The audit itself is typically complete within a few weeks of receiving your statements. Once we present findings and begin negotiating with your processor, most clients see corrected rates within 30 to 60 days. From that point forward, the savings repeat every single month, automatically, on every statement, without you having to do anything.

That is exactly what they say to every merchant. Every time. Our founders were executives inside Fifth Third Processing Solutions, later Vantiv and Worldpay, now part of Global Payments, the world’s largest card processor, for over a decade. They know how rates are structured, where the margin is buried, and how processors are trained to respond when a merchant pushes back. When we negotiate on your behalf, we are not guessing. We built the machine. We know exactly where it's stealing from you.

Hidden fees are fees designed to look like they came from the processing networks, passed through to you as if the processor had no choice. They didn't create them, they'll tell you. They're just passing them along. Except they're not. These fees are crafted to blend in, to look official, to avoid the one question that would unravel everything. We have found millions in hidden fees on some of the largest companies in the world, companies with entire finance departments who never caught it.

Here's the truth processors don't want you to think about: moving a transaction from Point A to Point B is closer to a utility than a complex service. If processors were straightforward, there would be exactly one question, what's your discount rate? The reason your statement has dozens of line items, obscure fee names, and language nobody outside the industry understands is not accidental. It is a system built specifically to make sure you never know what you're actually paying. We know it because we came from inside it.

None. We review your statements. Your processor is not contacted. There is no disruption to your processing, no risk to your merchant account, and no obligation to hire us.

Two things happen: you find out you have a good deal, or you find out how much they are overbilling you. Knowledge is power. You decide if you want to hire us to get it fixed. The audit gives you a line item detail of exactly how and what they are doing. Either way, you are no longer in the dark on this mystery.

Every other auditing firm in this space has always been on the outside looking in. They learned how processing works the same way you did, from the outside. Our founders were executives inside Fifth Third Processing Solutions, later Vantiv and Worldpay, now part of Global Payments, the world’s largest card processor, for over a decade. They spent years inside the industry helping build the systems that extract margin from merchants. They know every mechanism, every loophole, every line item, because they were on the other side of the table. That is not something any competitor can replicate.

Adidas. Reebok. Puma. Yamaha. Pioneer. Medtronic. Ryder. Olympus. ASSA ABLOY. Shimano. Polk Audio. Newell Brands, see our website for an even more complete list.

These are not small companies. They have CFOs, controllers, finance teams, and outside accountants. They still got audited. They still found overcharges. That is not a coincidence, it is how the system is designed. The complexity is intentional. The fees are buried on purpose.

The question was never whether you're being overcharged. The question is how long you're going to wait to find out.

Not the way most people assume. There is no government agency reviewing your processing statement. No regulator is auditing the fees your processor charges you. Visa and Mastercard set interchange rates, but those are network rules, not consumer protections. Beyond that, processors operate largely under whatever terms are buried in the contract you signed, often dozens of pages long, written entirely in their favor.

The Durbin Amendment provided some regulation on debit interchange for large banks, but it did almost nothing to limit what processors charge merchants on top of that. The short answer: the fox is guarding the henhouse. There is no watchdog coming. The only protection a merchant has is someone who knows the system from the inside, and is working for them instead of against them.

Kevin Harrington, one of the original Sharks on Shark Tank, before Mark Cuban took his seat, is a big fan of what we do. He wrote the foreword to our Managing Partner's book, The Great American Heist. He has also said that weAudit is the only company that every company needs.

No, Robert was never on Shark Tank. But he does work with a Shark, and Kevin Harrington turns to weAudit to save money across his many business ventures. When one of the most seasoned investors in the country trusts you with his own processing costs, that says something. We help him keep more of what he earns. We can do the same for you.