Tell HN: I just haggled away 90% of my transactions fees | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I just haggled away 90% of my transactions fees

19 pointseof7 comments

Admittedly, we are a niche case, we have low volume high dollar amount incoming payments and high volume low dollar amount disbursements.

Going back and forth we started out at $149 set up fee, $25 a month, 1% + .25c per transcation in coming and 55c outgoing.

This is all ACH.

In less than an hour going back and forth with a couple places My final deal is $25 a month, $1.30 flat incoming, 25c outgoing.

That will save us ~1500+ a year assuming no growth.

The last time I set one of these up, it didn't even cross my mind to haggle.

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There's a startup based here in Chicago called FeeFighters

http://feefighters.com/

I've never tried it, but they'll apparently do this for you. They get a number of payment processors to bid for your business, and the winning bidder pays them a referral fee.

"That will save us ~1500+ a year assuming no growth."

Saving $1500 is no joke for sure but how much time do you think it cost you? I'm always trying to balance that "Is it worth it to spend my time saving money or to spend my time creating money?" I'm not trying to be critical of you - I hope it doesn't come across the wrong way here - but I'm genuinely interested.

He said, "In less than an hour going back and forth..."

I think my time is worth a lot of money, but $1500 per hour would earn you $3 million/year if you only worked 40-hour weeks.

What bank/provider were you able to do this haggling with if you don't mind my asking?

checkgateway.com is who I went with finally.

But it was actually when I was talking to some other company that I asked if he had 'room' because I was going to talk to a bunch of people and I thought I could do better on the setup fee. He said definitely.

So when I called around and some lady asked if I had talked to anyone else, I said yes. When she asked what they quoted I laughed at her (very jovially) and told her of course not but she could tell me her prices. She was totally into it in the sense she was ready for / expecting to be haggled with.

I just signed up with a local SMS gateway service for receiving payments, at a 50% discount in signup fee and monthly fees. I figured it couldn't hurt to ask - and I got exactly what I asked for.

Which means you probably could have gotten more :)

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