Crypto vs Card Fees: The Real Math on Every $100,000 in Sales

Payment fees are the tax nobody quotes you at signup. They sit at 2.9% plus 30 cents on most card transactions, and by the end of the year they are one of the largest line items a small business never negotiated. Stablecoin payments change that number by an order of magnitude. This is the real math — not a marketing figure — with the parts each rail would rather you not add up.

How much do card payments actually cost?

A US card payment costs a merchant roughly 2.9% + $0.30 online (the standard published rate at processors like Stripe), and a blended 3.5% is a fair estimate once you include international cards, premium rewards cards, and chargeback fees. That fee is really three stacked fees: interchange paid to the card-issuing bank, network assessments paid to Visa or Mastercard, and the processor's own margin.

*Assumes an average ticket around $75, so $100,000 is roughly 1,330 transactions at $0.30 each. The exact number moves with your average order value — a store selling $15 items pays far more in fixed per-transaction fees than one selling $500 items.

What does a USDC payment on Arbitrum cost?

A USDC payment on Furlpay costs a flat 0.5% plus Arbitrum gas, which runs between a tenth of a cent and half a cent per transaction. There is no interchange because there is no card-issuing bank, no network assessment because there is no card network, and no chargeback reserve because on-chain payments are final. You can verify a live quote right now at furlpay.com/api/payments/fees/estimate.

$100,000 in card sales  →  you keep ~$96,700
$100,000 in USDC sales  →  you keep ~$99,495
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                              ~$2,795 more, per $100k

The costs each side hides

Honest comparisons have to include the awkward parts. Cards hide the cost of chargebacks and multi-day settlement holds: a disputed transaction can cost you the sale plus a $15-$25 dispute fee, and a rolling reserve ties up cash you have already earned. Stablecoins hide a different cost: your customer needs USDC and a wallet. Furlpay narrows that gap with passkey wallets that need no seed phrase and a checkout that guides funding, but card acceptance is still more universal today. The right framing is not "crypto replaces cards everywhere" — it is "offer USDC as the cheaper option and keep the 0.5% instead of the 3%."

• Card costs that do not show on the sticker: chargeback fees, rolling reserves, cross-border surcharges, and PCI compliance overhead.
• Stablecoin costs that do not show on the sticker: customer wallet friction and the operational work of holding or converting USDC — both shrinking as passkey wallets mature.
• Where the math is decisive: high volume, low margin, cross-border, and recurring or machine-to-machine payments.

When cards still win

If most of your customers will only ever tap a card, a 0.5% rail they do not use saves nothing. Cards win on ubiquity, on familiar dispute rights, and on the long tail of local payment methods that processors like Stripe support. That is why most businesses adding stablecoin acceptance run it alongside cards rather than instead of them — see our full breakdown in Furlpay vs Stripe.

Run your own number

The figures above scale linearly, so the savings on your volume are easy to estimate: multiply your annual card volume by roughly 3% to see what you would keep at 0.5%. Or use the interactive fee savings calculator to plug in your volume and average ticket, and read our payments product page for how settlement works end to end.

The card fee is not a law of nature. It is the price of a specific set of intermediaries. Remove the intermediaries and 3% becomes 0.5% — the same dollars, minus the toll.

Furlpay is not a bank. Card figures are typical published rates and vary by issuer, card type, merchant category, and geography; the Furlpay figure is live and verifiable but excludes any conversion you choose to do between USDC and local currency. This article is informational, not financial advice.