What Pool Service Software Charges You to Take a Payment

Shopping for pool service software means comparing subscription prices, because that is the number every vendor puts in large type. The spread is real: $35 a month at one end, $98 at the other, with most of the market between $45 and $65. An owner can spend a fortnight deciding between them.

Meanwhile, a company billing $15,000 a month and collecting most of it on cards is paying somewhere around $470 to $520 a month to move that money. That is five to fifteen times the subscription being agonised over, it is charged by the same software in most cases, and of eight pool platforms whose pages we read on 21 October 2026, exactly one publishes the rate on its pricing page. This is an attempt to put that line where an owner can see it.

The arithmetic nobody puts on a pricing page

Take a residential book of 120 accounts at $125 a month, which is $15,000 of monthly invoicing and a shape a great many pool companies would recognise. Suppose all of it is collected on cards, which is what happens when autopay is the default and nobody is chasing cheques. At Stripe's standard card rate of 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction, the percentage comes to $435 and the per-transaction charges to $36, so $471 a month. At 3.2% plus $0.30 it is $480 plus $36, so $516 a month. The difference between those two rates, on that one book, is $45 a month or $540 a year.

Both of those figures are larger than any subscription in this market. The $45 of difference between them is, on its own, larger than several of the subscriptions in this market. That is the whole point of this piece: the number an owner is choosing on is not the number that decides what the software costs. And unlike a plan price, the processing line scales with revenue, so it grows every time the business does.

We are in the bottom group, and it would be dishonest to write this piece without saying so first. Our own pricing page carries the sentence "Card and ACH payments run through Stripe, which charges its own processing fees" and no number. Our Stripe integration page, published on 21 October 2026, goes one step further without going as far as a rate: "Stripe charges its own processing fees; Pool Runs adds no payment fee." That tells you there is no platform margin sitting on top of the processor's rate, which is the thing that decides whether the rate is yours to negotiate. It still leaves an owner to go and look the actual percentage up somewhere else, and PoolDial does better on that specific count.

The vendor that publishes a rate charges the most for it

PoolDial's pricing page is the most transparent document on payments in this market. It names the card rate, names the ACH rate, breaks the ACH rate into its parts, says ACH has to be enabled and approved by Stripe for your account, warns that a bank account selected through Link does not automatically qualify for the ACH rate, and states that payments collected outside Stripe — "such as checks or Zelle" — carry no PoolDial processing fee at all. Every one of those is a thing an owner would otherwise discover in month three.

What that transparency reveals is a rate above the market standard. Stripe's published card rate is 2.9% plus $0.30; PoolDial's is 3.2% plus $0.30, so three tenths of a percent of every card payment is the platform's rather than the processor's. On ACH the structure matters more than the headline. PoolDial describes its 1.1% as "Stripe's 0.8% is capped at $5 per payment, plus PoolDial's uncapped 0.3%". On a $125 residential invoice the Stripe portion is a dollar, under the cap, and the surcharge is 37 cents. On a $1,000 commercial invoice the Stripe portion hits the $5 cap while the uncapped 0.3% becomes $3 — so the fee on that invoice is $8 where a capped-only arrangement would be $5. For a commercial operator billing a handful of large accounts by bank transfer, the uncapped share is the entire story and the headline percentage tells you almost nothing.

Whose processing account the money runs through

Two arrangements look identical on an invoice and are not. In the first, you hold the merchant account — commonly your own Stripe account — the software connects to it, and the rate is whatever your processor agreed with you. In the second, the platform holds the account, collects on your behalf and pays you out, and the rate is whatever the platform decides to charge, which may be the processor's rate plus a margin. The question to ask on a demo call is simply: whose Stripe account is this, and if I leave you, who keeps the payment history and the stored cards?

Why whose account it is matters as much as the rate

This is the part of the answer that explains why four vendors publish no figure, and it is not all evasion. On Pool Runs, online payments run through your own Stripe account and the money lands there; our pages say so in those words. We therefore cannot publish your rate, because we do not set it — Stripe does, and a company doing real volume can negotiate it. Pool Office Manager says the same thing in a different shape: a 2.9% rate through its preferred vendor, or "Stripe's standard processing rates" if you bring your own. EZ Pool Biller is the most explicit about the logic, noting in its manual that the percentages it quotes are Stripe's published pricing at the time of writing and that your actual rate is "whatever your Stripe agreement says".

That is a real reason, and it is also a convenient one, so treat it sceptically on every page including ours. The honest version of the claim is narrow: a vendor that does not hold the merchant account cannot quote your rate, but it can and should tell you whose account it is, whether it adds anything of its own, and what the standard rate is today. Three of the four silent vendors do not do the middle one of those three. The test that cuts through all of it takes one question: ask whether the platform adds any percentage or per-transaction amount of its own on top of the processor's, and get the answer in writing before the trial ends.

What each one actually does with an invoice

Processing is the biggest line, but it is not the only thing that separates these products, and the capability differences are narrower than the marketing suggests. All seven of the platforms we could read create and send invoices, and all seven take cards. The real divergence is in what happens to an invoice that nobody pays, and in whether the awkward payments — the customer who insists on a cheque, the one who pays by Zelle — can be recorded at all.

Three cells in that table are worth more than a tick. EZ Pool Biller is the only one of the seven that publishes automatic late fees as a feature — "Late fees applied automatically based on your rules", with per-customer waivers — alongside dunning follow-ups and monthly statements carrying a cryptographic signature so the transaction data can be shown to be unaltered. For a company whose receivables problem is chronic rather than occasional, that is a more useful set of tools than anything on the processing side, and it is on a $35 plan.

Pool Office Manager is the only one that publishes a QuickBooks Desktop path, as a one-way transfer of invoices out of the system, with the two-way Online integration priced as a $25 add-on. Every other vendor here is QuickBooks Online or silent on the question. If your accountant still runs Desktop — and in this industry a good number do — that single row decides the shortlist regardless of everything else on this page. And Skimmer publishes the bluntest collections tool of the set: "you can auto-suspend past-due customers so you're never servicing a pool for free", which is a policy decision wearing a feature's clothes, and one worth thinking about before you switch it on.

Our own row loses on late fees and we are not going to dress that up. Pool Runs marks invoices overdue against their terms each day, groups balances in an A/R aging report so the office knows who to call first, and can email every customer with an unpaid invoice in one broadcast; following that up automatically by text or email needs the Engage add-on at $50 a month. What it does not do is add a charge to a late invoice on its own. If automatic late fees are the reason you are buying, that is a row where a cheaper product does more.

Price the processing line for your own book

1. 1

   Find what you collected by card last month, and on how many transactions

   Both numbers are on your processor statement, and you need both: the percentage rides on the total and the fixed fee rides on the count. A book collected in many small invoices pays far more in per-transaction charges than the same revenue collected in a few large ones.

2. 2

   Work out your real blended rate

   Divide total fees by total collected. That single percentage is the number to carry into every sales call, and it is usually higher than the headline rate because of the per-transaction charges and any card types that price differently. Compare it against 2.9% plus $0.30 to see whether anyone is adding a margin.

3. 3

   Ask each vendor the two questions that are not on their pricing page

   Whose merchant account does the money run through, and does the platform add any percentage or fixed amount of its own on top of the processor's? Get both answers in writing. A vendor that cannot answer the second question quickly is telling you something.

4. 4

   Price the ACH switch separately, with your actual invoice sizes

   Bank debit is dramatically cheaper than cards on large invoices because the processor fee is capped, so the saving concentrates in your commercial accounts. Run it on the five biggest invoices you send, not on the average, and check whether any platform percentage sitting on top of that fee is capped too.

5. 5

   Add the subscription last

   Once the processing line is on the page, put the plan prices next to it. On most residential books the subscription will be the smaller number by a wide margin, and the fortnight spent choosing between $45 and $65 will look like the wrong fortnight.

The short version

The subscription is the small number. On a $15,000 monthly book collected by card, processing runs roughly $470 to $520 a month against plan prices of $35 to $98, and it is the line the industry has collectively decided not to print. One vendor prints it and charges above the standard rate for the privilege of knowing. Four print nothing, and three of those four do not even tell you whose merchant account your customers' money is passing through, which is the part that actually determines whether the rate is negotiable.

On our side of it: Pool Runs runs card and bank payments through your own Stripe account, so we take no margin on them and cannot quote you a rate — what our invoicing does with a month of route work sets out the rest, and invoicing, auto-pay, the customer portal and the two-way QuickBooks Online sync are all in the core plan rather than on a tier. We lose the automatic-late-fee row to a cheaper product and the published-rate row to a dearer one, and both of those are in the tables above rather than left out of them. If the unit each vendor meters on is the question rather than the processing line, how nine pool platforms actually charge covers that; if it is what a bolted-together stack of five subscriptions costs against one platform, we priced that line by line; and if the problem is the billing run itself rather than the fees on it, what recurring billing has to do for a route is the one to read.