The £8.50 question: why we built Invoicr around bank transfers, not cards

The card processor trap

When you're a plumber or electrician working across London, you need clients to pay you. Card processors made that easy, or so it seemed. You set up a Stripe or Square account, slap a QR code on your invoice, and payments roll in. But the cut they take is punishing for small transactions.

On a £500 invoice, most card processors charge 1.4% to 2.5% plus a flat fee. That's £12.50 gone, straight away. Do fifteen jobs a month at that rate and you're handing over £187.50 every month to people you've never met, for the privilege of accessing money that's already yours.

The worse part is how invisible it becomes. You invoice, payment arrives, and you think you've been paid. But you haven't. Not fully. The processor takes their cut before the money hits your account. It's baked into every transaction so smoothly that most sole traders just accept it as a business cost.

How bank-to-bank actually works

Open banking changed this. It's been quietly available in the UK since 2018, but most payment software never bothered to use it. Why? Because card processing is how they make their money.

Invoicr is built on the opposite assumption: you should keep your money.

When a client clicks the payment link on their Invoicr invoice, they're not entering card details. They're logging into their own bank through open banking. Their bank confirms the payment to us, we confirm it to you, and the money goes straight into your account. No card processor. No middleman taking a percentage.

The maths is straightforward. On that same £500 invoice, a client pays you £500. Invoicr takes a flat fee of around £4. You receive £496. Compare that to the £487.50 you'd get from a card processor, and the difference is immediate.

For a busy tradesperson, that compounds fast. Over a year, on moderate invoicing volume, you're keeping hundreds or thousands of pounds that would have otherwise vanished.

Why nobody else does this

When I started talking to payment platforms about this model, I got confused looks. The biggest players have built their entire business around the card processing percentage. They depend on it. Reducing it to a flat fee doesn't fit their growth projections.

There's also a perception problem. People expect payment links to look a certain way. Card, card, card. A payment page that asks for your banking login feels unfamiliar, even if it's safer and cheaper.

Building this required conversations with banks, integrations with open banking networks, and a mobile app that could display payment pages cleanly. It wasn't the easy path. But it was the right one for UK tradespeople, who are used to doing business face to face, not hidden behind payment processor margins.

The real cost of keeping the lights on

I should be honest about something. Invoicr isn't free because we're altruistic. The flat fee model means we make less per transaction than Stripe. We're betting that we can serve you better and build something you'll actually want to use, even if it means lower margins.

On the Free tier, you get 5 invoices a month and 3 customers, completely at no cost. You can test the payment model without commitment. Move to Pro at £9.99 a month, or £79.99 a year, and you unlock unlimited invoices, automated payment reminders, the ability to send invoices and reminders over WhatsApp, and a quotes tool. The Business tier adds team seats, VAT compliance, and accountant export for £19.99 monthly.

The point is this: we're not trying to sneak margin out of payment fees. You know what you're paying, and it's transparent. The money you save on processing fees goes back into your business, not into ours.

What happens when clients push back

A few weeks after launch, I got a message from a customer. His client had asked why the payment page looked different from what they expected. The customer explained that it was faster, cheaper, and went straight to the tradesperson. The client paid. No friction.

That's been the pattern. People worry that clients won't understand or won't trust open banking. In practice, most people recognise their own banking login and feel safer using it than handing over card details to a third party.

For the tradesperson, the story is even clearer. Faster payment, lower cost, cleaner reporting. No wonder. If you're invoicing clients on your phone between jobs, waiting three to five days for card payments to clear while fees stack up, the bank transfer method isn't just a feature. It's the whole reason to switch.