{
 "schema_version": "1.0",
 "id": "flatpay",
 "name": "Flatpay",
 "research_status": "researched",
 "vendor_domain": "flatpay.com",
 "category": "Financial Operations",
 "task": "Paying bills & getting paid",
 "summary": "Card terminals, POS systems and online payments for physical shops across Europe, sold with on-site installation and 24/7 support. One flat rate on every card type: 1.49% on the terminal, 1.69% on the POS tiers, with daily payouts and no monthly subscription.",
 "best_for": "a physical shop, café or bar with steady card turnover above £1,100 a month that wants one predictable rate on every card type instead of a pricing table full of card categories. The on-site installation and 24/7 support suit an owner who would rather not configure hardware, and daily payouts help if cash flow is tight",
 "skip_if": "your card takings are small or seasonal: the £1,100 monthly minimum and the £39 shortfall charge punish exactly that pattern, and the price list says the assessment is annual so a quiet winter still counts. Skip it too if you are online-only — this is built around physical terminals and an in-person sales visit — or if you turn over more than £200,000 a year on cards, because then every published price is replaced by a quote",
 "honest_knock": "“Zero monthly fees” is the headline, and there genuinely is no subscription — but there is a floor. Miss £1,100 of card turnover in a month (the price list's figure on 14 October 2026, incl. VAT; it was £995 in September) and you are charged £39, which for a quiet month is the same thing as a monthly fee wearing a different hat. Do the sum before you sign: a shop turning over £500 on cards pays £7.45 in transaction fees and then £39 on top, so the cost of taking cards is six times what the rate suggests. The rate itself is straightforward and the terminal really is free to start, so this is a good fit for a busy till and a poor one for a market stall, a seasonal business or anyone whose card volume swings. And the four-figure POS installation charges are real money that the “no hidden fees” promise sits directly above — they are disclosed, but they are not what most people picture when they read that line.",
 "pricing": {
  "status": "public",
  "entry_price": "1.49%",
  "entry_price_terms": "per card transaction, no monthly subscription (POS plans 1.69% plus an up-front fee)",
  "from_price_usd_month": null,
  "plans": null,
  "plans_source": null,
  "notes": "(re-verified 2026-10-14 on flatpay.com/en-gb/pricing and their separate /pricelist page; the four transaction rates and up-front fees unchanged since 2026-08-13, the minimum monthly turnover changed -- see below) Flatpay charges one rate per transaction on every card type, with no monthly subscription. The card terminal is 1.49% and costs GBP 0 to start. The three point-of-sale tiers all run at 1.69% and differ only in what you pay up front for onboarding and installation: GBP 995 for mobile POS, GBP 1,495 for POS Pro and GBP 2,495 for POS Premium. Every one of those four prices is labelled \"Below GBP 200,000 in annual card turnover\". CHANGED SINCE AUGUST: the above-threshold panel is no longer reachable on the UK page -- there is no visible toggle, and the markup for it sits in a display:none component variant. That hidden markup holds both a \"custom rate - contact sales\" variant and a \"0,99% / EUR 0\" variant; neither renders for a UK visitor, and the comma decimal and euro sign mark the second as another market's card, so we do not quote 0.99% as a Flatpay UK rate (a WebFetch read it as a live figure on 2026-08-20 and that was wrong then too). Included on all plans: 24/7 support, daily payouts and a customer portal. The part that needs reading is the price list, linked from the footer rather than from the pricing page. It sets a minimum monthly turnover, GBP 1,100 incl. VAT on 14 October 2026 (it read GBP 995 in August and September 2026), and charges GBP 39 in any month you fall short -- assessed annually, so seasonal businesses are explicitly in scope. It also lists GBP 410 for a replacement terminal, GBP 25 to re-onboard after a change in business registration, and hardware separately: tablet GBP 495, printer GBP 495, cash drawer GBP 200. The page footnote says all prices exclude VAT; the turnover minimum is the one line labelled incl. VAT. One inconsistency worth raising with their salesperson: the pricing page puts POS Pro onboarding at GBP 1,495 while the price list quotes a \"Pro POS bundle\" at GBP 1,995 -- a GBP 500 gap between two pages on the same site.",
  "verified_at": "2026-10-14",
  "source_url": null
 },
 "free_plan": false,
 "free_plan_evidence": null,
 "cost_traps": [],
 "compare_with": {
  "name": "Payoneer",
  "why": "not a like-for-like rival — Payoneer moves money for online and cross-border businesses while Flatpay sells the terminal on your counter — but it is the comparison our readers reach for when they ask what taking payments actually costs. The useful contrast is structural: Flatpay publishes one flat percentage and hides the conditions in a separate price list, where the fee that catches people out is a turnover floor rather than a per-transaction surprise"
 },
 "links": {
  "record": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/api/v1/products/flatpay.json",
  "review": "https://officesoftwaremarketplace.com/flatpay-review.html",
  "marketplace": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/marketplace/flatpay/",
  "vendor_site": "https://flatpay.com"
 },
 "purchase": {
  "seller": "the vendor",
  "how": "AIBuilder Marketplace does not sell this software. Sign up, start a trial or buy on the vendor's site.",
  "handoff_url": "https://try.flatpay.com/cvoy8rottjop",
  "affiliate": true,
  "disclosure": "Where purchase.affiliate is true, purchase.handoff_url is an affiliate link: AIBuilder Marketplace may earn a commission at no extra cost to the buyer. Commission never changes what a record says, and products are not ranked by commission. Where it is false the link is the vendor's plain site."
 },
 "provenance": {
  "research": "hand-researched dossier, read on the vendor's own pages",
  "researched_since": "2026-07",
  "method": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/how-we-review/",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0. Credit 'AIBuilder Marketplace' with a link to https://aibuildermarketplace.com/atlas/.",
  "note": "A rebuild is not a new measurement: pricing.verified_at is the date that matters."
 },
 "cost": {
  "status": "not_yet",
  "engine": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/agents/#cost",
  "rules": null,
  "growth": null
 },
 "unknowns": [
  "Plan-by-plan prices are not structured in this record yet; pricing.notes has the full text.",
  "Contract terms (cancellation, data export, data location, minimum seats) are not researched as separate fields; pricing.notes mentions them only where the vendor's pricing page does.",
  "No computable price rules yet: cost at a given team size cannot be calculated for this product.",
  "Not tested hands-on by us: what the product does comes from the vendor's pages and our reading of them."
 ],
 "task_evidence": null,
 "open_questions": [
  {
   "question_id": "flatpay:cancellation_terms",
   "key": "cancellation_terms",
   "question": "Can a customer cancel at any time, and what happens to an annual plan that is cancelled mid-term?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "flatpay:data_export",
   "key": "data_export",
   "question": "Which data can a customer export, in which formats, on which plans?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "flatpay:data_location",
   "key": "data_location",
   "question": "Where is customer data stored, and can a customer choose the region?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "flatpay:minimum_seats",
   "key": "minimum_seats",
   "question": "Is there a minimum number of seats or users on any plan?",
   "status": "open"
  }
 ],
 "vendor_answers": [],
 "agent_channels": {
  "vendor_mcp": null,
  "agent_checkout": {
   "status": "not_found",
   "detail": "No explicit support for purchases by AI agents on the vendor's own pages.",
   "checked_at": "2026-10-07",
   "method": "homepage, /pricing and the pricing page we cite, read as plain HTML (no JavaScript) and searched for explicit support of purchases by AI agents: Agentic Commerce Protocol, Instant Checkout, Agent Payments Protocol, buy in ChatGPT, agentic checkout"
  }
 }
}