4 September 2026

How best to take card payments in person and online - each provider compared

Fewer people bring cash to a school fair every year, so at some point every PTA asks what taking cards would cost. Here are the five providers you're likely to come across, what they charge, and where the advertised rate is misleading.

Every rate below was read from the provider’s own pricing page on 4 September 2026. They change them. Check before you commit.

What they charge

Reader prices include VAT. They all advertise ex-VAT, which makes the headline look 20% better than the invoice does. They also discount the readers constantly, so treat these as the most you should pay and have a look for an offer before you buy.

Have a look at the fourth column. All five will now take a payment on an ordinary phone with no reader at all, so hardware isn't really a reason to pick one over another any more. For most PTAs the cheapest answer is to buy nothing.

The exception is signal. A phone reader is only as good as the phone's data, and if your field or hall hasn't got any it'll fail at exactly the wrong moment. If that's you, the £94.80 SumUp Solo is worth the money. It's got its own SIM, and it can keep taking payments offline if even that drops. More on it below.

The headline rate is the wrong number

Read the table quickly and Stripe looks cheapest in person: 1.4% against SumUp's 1.69%. Then add the 10p it charges on every authorisation and run a cake stall through it.

Online works the same way round. SumUp charges a flat percentage at both ends and Stripe charges a lower one plus a fixed fee. What changes is that SumUp's online rate is 2.5% rather than 1.69%, so it stops being the cheaper option a lot sooner.

Here's what a single sale costs at both ends. Everything after the first column is the fee you'd pay on that sale, not what you keep. The cheaper of each pair is in bold and the shaded rows are where they swap over.

In person SumUp is cheaper on anything under £34.48. On a £2.00 cake, Stripe's 1.4% actually works out at 6.40%. Online the same thing happens but the line drops to £20.00, because the gap between the two rates is much wider than it is in person. Against Square it's £22.73.

A PTA sells very little above either line. Raffle tickets, teas, cakes and the tombola all sit at the left-hand end of that table, where the fixed fee is most of what you pay and the advertised percentage barely matters.

None of it matters much in the end, because Zeffy charges nothing for any of it. It does have its drawbacks and I've set those out below.

The one subscription, and why you should not buy it

SumUp will sell you Payments Plus at £19 a month, or £189 a year. It takes domestic debit and credit cards from 1.69% down to 0.99%. That's a saving of 0.7%, so you need about £27,000 a year going through the reader before it's worth anything.

Gift Aid is worth more than the fees

Gift Aid adds 25% to an eligible donation. On £2,000 of giving that's £500, against about £50.00 you'd save by picking the cheapest processor. It isn't close. The hard part has always been collecting the declarations.

Of the five here, only Zeffy connects to Swiftaid. It captures the declaration at the moment somebody gives. The donor signs up with Swiftaid once and reauthorises each year, and after that their declarations come through automatically, so you're not chasing people by email in March. Swiftaid doesn't charge charities.

Zeffy isn't the only platform that does this. JustGiving connects to Swiftaid too. But it's the only one of the five here.

How Zeffy can charge nothing

Zeffy costs a charity nothing. No percentage, no fixed fee, no subscription. That's unusual enough to be worth understanding rather than just taking, because it isn't magic.

It's funded by an optional contribution asked of your donors at checkout. When somebody gives you £20.00 they're shown a suggested tip to Zeffy on top. They can set it to nothing, and if they do you still get the full £20.00. Zeffy says about two thirds of donors leave something.

So it does cost you something, just not money. Your supporters get asked for a contribution that doesn't go to your school. Some committees will mind that. Ours didn't, on the basis that the alternative was paying a percentage on every gift.

On £2,000 of online donations across 80 gifts: SumUp £50.00, Square £48.00, Stripe £46.00, and Zeffy £0.00.

What about Classlist, PTA Events and Zeffy?

Classlist and PTA Events aren't card providers. They're PTA platforms — class lists, event pages, ticketing, raffles — and when a parent pays, Stripe takes the payment and the platform adds its cut on top. So neither can be cheaper than Stripe used directly. You're buying ticketing, not a better rate.

Which matters, because Zeffy does the same jobs for nothing — tickets, raffles, memberships, auctions. Price the free one first. What these two add is the class lists and the school-community side, not the payment mechanics.

200 tickets at £10.00, at each platform's registered charity rate. Zeffy's £0.00 is a real figure, not a missing one — it covers the card fee too, funded by the optional contribution its checkout asks your buyers for. If your PTA isn't registered, Stripe's rate throughClasslist and PTA Events rises to 1.5%.

PTA Events' free tier is the dearest option on this page — 5.15%, over three times Stripe direct. Its Premium tier cuts that but costs £359.99 a year, so it needs £14,693 of online tickets a year to beat their own free tier. Same trap as SumUp's subscription, same answer.

Both let you pass the fee to the buyer. That moves who pays, not how much leaves the community. And raffles cost more than tickets on both — Classlist raffles 4.5% + Stripe, reduced from 7.5%; PTA Events auctions, raffles and 100 clubs 5%; prize draws 7.5% — so check that rate, not the ticket one.

Not every provider will let you sell raffle tickets

This one catches people out, and it is worth checking before you take a penny. A PTA raffle is gambling in law — normally a small society lottery under the Gambling Act 2005, registered with your council. Payment providers write their terms against gambling as a category, and a school raffle lands inside it unless they deliberately carve it out. Some do. One of the ones a PTA is most likely to already own does not.

The practical upshot is awkward, because it splits almost exactly the wrong way: the three providers a PTA is most likely to already own a reader for are the three that will not simply let you sell a raffle ticket, and the two that will are the online ones. Square is the strictest — it names lottery tickets outright. SumUp lists them under gambling. Zettle (PayPal) is not a flat no, but it is on PayPal's requires-approval list, so it means asking before your fair, not after.

It also explains why Classlist and PTA Events can offer raffle products at all — they run on Stripe, which permits charity raffles here. And it is the strongest practical argument for Zeffy in this whole piece: it is free, and selling raffle tickets is a thing it is built to do rather than a thing you are hoping nobody minds.

Read from each provider's own published list on 5 September 2026. These are summaries of somebody else's terms, they change, and yours is the account that gets closed — so check with your provider before you sell a ticket rather than taking our word for it. Nothing here is legal advice about whether your raffle needs registering; that is a question for your council.

Neither sells a card reader, so neither answers "how do we take cards at the summer fair". They're worth paying for if you want the ticketing and the class lists. They aren't worth paying for as a way to take a card payment.

Work it out on your own numbers

The tables above are a single sale. Here's the same arithmetic on a whole year of them. If you already sync a card reader to Treasurer's Ledger you can pull your real sales in, and it will compare what each provider would have charged against what you actually paid.

There's a fuller version of this inside Treasurer's Ledger itself. Once you have an account and your card reader is connected, Card payments has a "What have card fees cost us?" button that adds up what you have actually been charged, compares it with every other provider on those same sales, and includes SumUp's paid tier priced over however long a period you are looking at. For SumUp it can also ask for your history going back three years, further than you have imported — read-only, and nothing it finds is added to your accounts.

Which should you use?

Two questions.

How my PTA is set up

SumUp at events, Zeffy for everything online. Here's the honest version of why, including the bits I'd change.

We paid for Payments Plus for a year and only just made the money back

It's £189 a year and saves 0.7% on domestic cards, so you need around £27,000 through the reader before it's worth anything. We thought we were comfortably over that. At the end of the year we'd saved roughly what we'd spent.

Have a proper think before you do it, and especially if your shop and ticket sales go through Zeffy. Everything you move online comes off the SumUp total, and the subscription only pays back on what you take at events. That's a smaller number than it feels like when you're stood behind a stall on a Saturday.

The Solo, if your field has no signal

Most cheap readers pair to your phone over Bluetooth and use the phone's data. That's fine indoors. Our school field has almost no signal, and a card machine that relies on a volunteer's phone finding 4G is one that stops working at the summer fair, in a queue, with a box of raffle tickets.

The Solo has its own SIM, so it doesn't need your phone or the school wifi. It's £94.80 against £30.00 for the phone-paired one. I hadn't actually looked at it properly until recently and I wish I had. If your site has the same problem it's worth every penny of the difference.

It's also got an offline mode for when even its own signal goes. Worth understanding before you rely on it though. An offline payment is only provisionally approved: the card gets read and held on the device, then sent for authorisation when it reconnects. So a card with no money on it fails after your customer has gone home, and you carry that risk on every payment you take offline. It isn't switched on for every account either, so check yours has it rather than finding out in a queue.

Zeffy online, with two real annoyances

Nothing else comes close on cost, and the Swiftaid link makes it an easy decision. It isn't all upside though. The reporting is thinner than SumUp's, with less detail on each transaction and less you can do with it, and the interface takes more getting used to than it should. If you like being able to dig into your own numbers you'll notice.

Zeffy Tap to Pay: watching it, not switching

Zeffy have launched Tap to Pay on ordinary phones and it's free, which on paper ends the argument for paying 1.69% at a stall.

Two things stop me. It still asks for a contribution to Zeffy when someone pays, and doing that to a parent who has just handed over a fiver for a raffle ticket at the school gate feels different to asking on a donation page they chose to visit. It's annoying. And it puts the takings into that thinner reporting.

If that prompt gets less intrusive in person, or the reporting improves, I'll move and I'll update this. I haven't run it through a real fair yet.

Rates were read from each provider’s own UK pricing page on 4 September 2026 and are the standard published rates, not negotiated ones. This is general information to help you compare, not a recommendation about your charity’s particular circumstances.