by Matt Rej
Joist is a popular estimating and invoicing solution that’s versatile enough to support all types of contractors. Plumbers, electricians, roofers, home remodelers, and even handymen can use it to create job estimates, turn those estimates into invoices, schedule jobs, and keep all client records in one place.
Once an invoice or estimate is live in an app, it’s natural to want your payments in there too. The customer gets an invoice, taps a button, and pays. It’s all organized within Joist, and you don’t have to chase anyone down.
Joist Payments is built to do exactly that. And it’s genuinely convenient. No debate there.
But the real question is what that convenience costs, and at what point it’s no longer worth it. With Joist Payments, the answer is honestly fairly obvious: it’s not worth it, and there’s almost no scenario where it should even be considered.
It may sound harsh. But read on, and I’ll explain why.
Both of Joist Payments Options Are Equally Expensive
Joist Payments runs on one of two processing rails: Stripe or PayPal.
Joist handles the invoice and checkout experience, while PayPal or Stripe holds the account and actually moves the money.
Giving you two options creates a false sense of competition. Because the rates are effectively the same. Both charge:
- 3.49% + $0.49 per transaction for credit cards and debit cards
- 4.99% + $0.49 per transaction for BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later)
The card rate is going to be where most of your transactions flow through. Beyond that, there are a few variations between the two options:
- Stripe offers ACH transfers and mobile check deposit, both at 1% capped at $15
- PayPal adds PayPal and Venmo payments at the same 3.49% + $0.49 rate as cards
- PayPal also offers tap-to-pay for in-person payments at 2.79% + $0.49 per transaction
Payouts land in your bank account in as little as two days. And faster access to your funds is available (for an additional fee).
Are Joist Payments Rates Really Too High?
3.49% + $0.49 to accept a card payment should never be considered for contractors using Joist. It’s not like you’re in a high-risk merchant category and desperate to find a processor who will work with you.
Consider this comparison:
- Stripe’s rates available to anyone start at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
- Joist’s Stripe rate is marked up an extra 0.59% + $0.19 to process those exact same cards.
And it’s not like Stripe’s published rates are a good deal to begin with. Stripe is a standard flat-rate processor with plenty of margin built in already.
Now Joist is layering its own markup on top of a process that was never competitive to begin with.
You can see the same pattern showing up with Stripe’s ACH fee, which is normally 0.8% capped at $5 (vs. 1%, $15 cap via Joist).
Where does the difference go?
When you set up the Stripe account through Joist, you’re not connecting a Stripe account that you already have. You’re opening a new one via Joist’s onboarding and managing everything from inside the app. This mirrors the standard onboarding pattern for software platforms built on Stripe Connect, and Stripe openly lets those platforms set their own pricing on each transaction.
PayPal is a slightly different story. You can connect an existing PayPal Business account, and Joist’s card rate matches what PayPal charges for its own branded checkout. So there’s no obvious added markup here.
But it still doesn’t make it a good rate. It’s the same expensive flat-rate processing with a different logo.
Why Flat-Rate Pricing Hits Contractors Harder Than Most Businesses
I don’t recommend flat-rate pricing for anyone. But a flat 3.49% is definitely the wrong pricing model for contractors.
Under a flat-rate structure, every card costs the same. While this may sound simple, it hides the underlying interchange rate, which is far much lower than what you might realize.
A better model is interchange-plus pricing, where you pay the actual interchange rate paid to the card issuer, plus network fees, and transparent markup from your processor. A debit card costs far less than a premium rewards card, and you can clearly see the difference on your statement.
Again, flat-rate pricing is really never a great option. But here’s why it’s even worse for contractors.
Large Tickets Magnify Every Basis Point
The fixed $0.49 component is irrelevant on a $4,000 water heater installation. It would be a bigger deal for say a coffee shop processing 20,000 small ticket transactions in a month.
The 3.49% percentage is what matters for large tickets, and it’s significantly higher than the wholesale rates underneath.
For context, a Visa credit card costs as low as 1.65% + $0.10 per transaction for card-not-present services. Less than half of Joist’s flat rate.
Which means even if your processor markup is 35 basis points, you’re still saving about 150 bps on those transactions compared to Joist Payments. That’s about $1,500 saved for every $100,000 you process.
Commercial Cards Can Qualify for Even Lower Rates
If you bill general contractors, property managers, or commercial customers, there’s a good chance those clients are paying with corporate or purchasing cards.
Those transactions can qualify for even lower interchange rates when they carry enhanced data, through network incentives like Visa’s Commercial Enhanced Data Program (CEDP) or Mastercard’s Level 2 or Level 3 programs.
For commercial large ticket transactions on Visa corporate/purchasing cards, CDEP drops the interchange rate down to 1.30% + $35 per transaction.
On a merchant account set up for commercial card optimization and pricing on interchange-plus, those savings will show up on your statement. Whereas if you’re on a flat-rate with Joist, the provider keeps the difference.
The Gap on Debit Cards is Even Higher
Interchange rates on regulated debit cards are capped by a federal rule, meaning they can only be charged a maximum of 0.05% + $0.22 per transaction.
Let’s say a customer wants to pay a $6,000 invoice with a debit card:
- With Joist Payments, this will cost you $209.89
- When the underlying interchange cost is just $30.22
That’s 7x more expensive for a transaction this size.
Paying 1% for ACH and Paper Checks
ACH is supposed to be the cheap alternative to card payments. And Joist’s version costs 1% for both, capped at $15 (3x Stripe’s own cap).
To be fair, this cap does make a difference on contractor invoices.
Because anything over $1,500 hits the $15 max. So a $10,000 payment via ACH works out to 0.15%, which is by far the best effective rate anywhere on Joist’s pricing.
But it’s still $10 more than going direct. And anything under $1,500 is a fee on money that your customer could send straight to your bank.
The mobile check deposit at the same 1% cap is much harder to defend. Your business checking account probably already offers this for less than $1 at most. And many offer free check deposits for the first 100 or 500 checks in a statement period (more than enough for most contractors to never hit the limit).
Passing Joist’s Fees to Your Customers Isn’t the Answer
Joist gives you the option to add surcharging on your payments as a way to offset processing costs. But due to a combination of network rules and other factors, you’re effectively capped at 3% here.
Meaning you’ll still pay a processing fee while forcing your clients to pay 3% more on every invoice.
That assumes you’re located and charging customers in a location where surcharging is legal. Laws vary by state, with it banned outright in states and lower caps in others.
And while we do see surcharging applied on some lower ticket transactions, a customer is far more likely to complain when they’re already paying thousands of dollars and you’re asking them to cover additional operating costs. It’s a bad look overall, and gets dicey when you assess the regulatory standards.
Weighing Convenience vs. Cost for Contractors
How much payment convenience does a contractor really need?
The strongest case for integrated payments is in reconciliation. For a restaurant doing 30,000 transactions in a month, they can genuinely benefit from payments that post themselves to the right check.
But most contractors aren’t dealing with that same problem.
Even a busy residential contractor may only send a few dozen payments in a single month. And a lot of those are likely deposits and progress payments on the same handful of jobs.
So when a payment lands to your processor or bank account, marking that invoice as paid in Joist takes just a few seconds. And Joist already syncs with QuickBooks on the accounting side.
Yes, Joist Payments is definitely convenient. But you have to ask yourself if the cost is actually worth it.
I’d say that you can conservatively estimate you’re paying an extra 1% on every card transaction with Joist. So run the quick math on your annual volume to think about that in terms of dollars.
For many of you, that 1% might come out to an extra $5,000, $10,000, or upwards of $25,000 in additional merchant fees that you could have avoided for an extra few seconds of “manual” work on each payment. The decision is yours, but I doubt that’s worth it for most of you.
Keep Joist for Invoicing and Your Processing Somewhere Else
To be clear, I’m not trying to discourage anyone from using Joist.
But as a merchant advocate, I can’t help but point out how dramatically more expensive its payment solution is compared to market alternatives.
You can still use Joist and keep your current payment processor. That setup would look something like this:
- Send estimates or invoices through Joist (as you normally would)
- Add your own payment instructions or a payment link from your processor to the invoice
- Take cards through a merchant account using payment links or a virtual terminal
- Accept ACH and checks directly to your bank
- Mark the invoice as paid in Joist when the money lands
Holding a merchant account directly also gives you something that Joist’s pricing never does: room to negotiate. Your own processor’s markup can be audited and pushed down.
Plus, you can optimize your payments to qualify for lower rates on certain transactions.
Processing integrations are often a toss up because they’re always more expensive, but sometimes worth it. But with Joist, the answer is pretty clear.
If you’re already processing cards directly and want to know whether you’re paying a fair rate, contact me or my team here at MCC for a free audit. We’ll review your statements and negotiate directly with your current provider, without switching anything.