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Comment by cloudwalking | Hacker News Reader

Daily Money: 1M Daily Revenue (@ 2.75%): 27.5K Yearly Gross: ~11M Employees: ~60 (about 180K yearly revenue per head!) Avg. Salary (Est.): 75K Yearly Salary (Est.): 4.5M

Assuming their other costs don't exceed $6M/yr, they're ALREADY profitable. Pretty slick. You just got Dorsey'd.

http://niketdesai.tumblr.com/post/3613418817/square-is-actua...

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Other things to factor in: - fixed costs of rent, computer equipment for personnel - variable costs incurred by servers, power consumption, etc - manufacturing (and support) of the reader

Either way, $1m/day is impressive and I'm sure they're only getting started.

I'm pretty sure most of their 2.75% take is eaten up in fees.

You're absolutely right. The processor (in this case Square) takes the smallest portion of the 2.75% with Visa/Mastercard taking the second highest, and the largest portion (by a large margin) going to the issuing bank.

Here's an illustration: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Gao-repor...

I agree with your tone...it is a great business they've worked themselves into. However, you are leaving out one major expense; I imagine they're paying the credit card companies between 1-1.5%.

Oh wow, I totally blanked on that - yeah agree. I'll edit that in because it blows my argument.

I suspect, however, that the cc terms will be nicer since, in theory, Square is opening up the market more than it's cannibalising it.

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