What a Clover actually costs you every month.

I resell Clover, Square, Valor, PAX and Dejavoo. I make money when you buy hardware and when you process on a program I set up, so read this the way you would read anything written by someone with a stake in the answer. I would rather you knew your real number than took mine on trust, because the merchants who understand their own statement are the ones who stay.

A Clover bill has four buckets, and almost every unpleasant surprise is a bucket somebody forgot to mention. One: the hardware. Two: the software plan, charged monthly and per device. Three: the processing, a percentage plus a per-item fee on every sale. Four: everything else — service and compliance line items outside the headline rate, plus any apps from Clover's app market. Miss a bucket and your estimate is wrong by more than the gap between two processors.

If what you want is the structural explanation — why the rate is bundled, why the same machine is priced differently at two shops on the same street — that page is already written: Clover fees explained. Read that for the why. Stay here for the how much.

Clover is not a flat-rate app with the software thrown in. It charges a monthly subscription, and the plan is chosen against how you sell. The published 2026 plans run from about $14.95/month for Essentials, through about $49.95/month for Register with inventory and item-level reporting, about $54.95/month for Counter Service Restaurant, up to about $84.95/month for Table Service Restaurant with table management. Clover can revise this, so confirm current plan pricing with the provider before you budget on it.

The word that catches people is per device. Two Stations is generally two subscriptions. A Station plus a Flex for tableside is generally two. Four handhelds is four. None of that is hidden, but it is routinely left out of the mental math when somebody compares a quote against the flat monthly they pay today. Count your devices and multiply.

Clover's published 2026 card-present rates run roughly 2.3% to 2.6% plus 10 cents, varying by plan and industry — restaurant plans nearer the low end, retail starter plans nearer the high end. Keyed and card-not-present sales are about 3.5% plus 10 cents. Those are bundled rates, with the card networks' interchange already folded in alongside the processor's markup, which is why two sellers can both say 2.6% and cost you different amounts. Processor pricing changes; treat any quoted rate as a snapshot and confirm the current one with your provider.

Here is the arithmetic that actually answers what will I pay a month. Take last month's card volume and transaction count. Multiply volume by your card-present rate, add ten cents per transaction, add the software plan for every device, then add every fixed monthly line item. That total divided by your card volume is your effective rate. A seller quoting a low percentage with four monthly line items under it can easily cost more than one quoting a higher percentage with none.

The advertised percentage is rarely the whole bill. Depending on who sold you the system, a statement can also carry a monthly statement or service fee, a PCI-compliance fee, and a platform or gateway fee. Add apps from Clover's app market — loyalty, scheduling, inventory, ordering — and each carries its own subscription that appears separately. None of it is concealed; it is in the paperwork. It is simply not in the number the salesperson said out loud.

Hardware is its own decision, and depending on the seller you may own the device outright or pay for it over time. I am not going to characterize any provider's terms here, because terms belong to the seller and they change. The boring advice holds: read the agreement in front of you, find every recurring charge, and make the person selling it point at each one in the document rather than describe it.

Last piece: what you can change without replacing anything. A Clover you like is a Clover worth keeping, and what usually needs fixing is the rate and structure behind it — including whether a compliant zero-cost or dual-pricing program fits, which is legal in all 50 states when set up and disclosed correctly and can often run on hardware you already own. The mechanics are on the processing page. Work out your real monthly number first.