Payments for Air Duct Cleaning: What Stripe, Square, and the Big Processors Actually Cost You

Duct-cleaning tickets: $250 for a condo, $350 average whole house, $480 with the dryer vent and sanitizer, $1,500+ for the commercial job. Your money depends on same-day collection — the "check is coming" customer is the one who disputed the work. Here is what the big processors actually charge at those ticket sizes, why photos on the receipt are dispute insurance, and when ACH beats cards. Rates checked October 2026. Also see Air Duct Cleaning, AI for Air Duct Cleaning, and Tech for Air Duct Cleaning.

The fee table: what each processor actually charges you

Square: 2.6%+$0.15 in-person, 2.9%+$0.30 online, 3.5%+$0.15 keyed/stored; Stripe: 2.7%+$0.05 in-person, 2.9%+$0.30 online, 3.4%+$0.30 stored. Interchange-plus estimates assume a 0.3% markup.

$250 condo (in-person): Square $6.65 · Stripe $6.80 · Interchange-plus ~$5

$350 whole house (in-person): Square $9.25 · Stripe $9.50 · Interchange-plus ~$7

$480 with dryer vent + sanitizer (invoice online): Square $14.22 · Stripe $14.22 · Interchange-plus ~$10.60

$480 (reader died in the crawlspace, keyed in): Square $16.95 · Stripe $16.62 · Interchange-plus ~$12.90

$1,500 commercial job: Square online $43.80 · Stripe online $43.80 · Interchange-plus ~$32.30 · ACH (0.8%, capped at $5) $5.00

At volume: 800 jobs a year at $350 = $280,000 in card revenue. Square: ~$7,400/year. Interchange-plus: ~$5,600/year. Difference: ~$1,800/year. But the fee table is the small story — the big story is disputes and days-to-paid in a business where the customer is already skeptical. Every processor rides on payments infrastructure — companies like Finix build the rails moving card money from your customer's bank to yours.

The workflow checklist the big processors fail

• Text-to-pay same-day. The invoice and payment link leave the driveway as a text with the before-and-after photos attached. The customer pays from the couch. Neither big processor ships this as a duct-cleaner-ready workflow.
• Photos on the receipt = dispute insurance. In a trade fighting a scam reputation, the photo-documented invoice is what wins the "they didn't do anything" chargeback. Documentation wins chargebacks — and this is the photo-documentation layer from Tech for Air Duct Cleaning.
• Commercial jobs on ACH. The $1,500 office-building job costs $43.80 on a card and $5 on ACH. One bank-details form, billed every cycle.
• Deposits on big jobs. Commercial and multi-unit work over $1,000 takes a deposit at booking. Stripe's API can authorize-now-capture-later; their content never tells a duct cleaner how.
• The crawlspace key-in. Reader dies where there's no signal, you type the card: Square jumps to 3.5% + $0.15. Carry a backup reader — it's cheaper than the keyed penalty.
• No "bill me" habit. Every invoice that goes out "later" ages. Same-day text-to-pay is the entire accounts-receivable department.
• Dual pricing. A cash price and a card price, both displayed — legal in all 50 states. Straight surcharging is banned in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
• Never lease a terminal — a $300 reader at $49/month for 48 months is a $2,352 reader. Your phone is the terminal.

The honest verdict on each processor

• Square: genuinely fine for a duct cleaner under ~$20k/month — the reader is simple, the tickets are small, the math is tolerable. The honest pick for year one.
• Stripe: great online; for a van-based duct cleaner it's a developer tool in a payments costume.
• Adyen: enterprise; no returned calls under ~$1M/year.
• Chase, Fiserv, Global Payments, Worldpay: quote-based, bank-led, zero duct-cleaning guidance. Fine if you negotiate hard; miserable if you sign unread.
• Built-in field-service payments (Housecall Pro from 2.59%, Jobber 2.9% + $0.30): convenient, Square-priced. Fine while you're small.
• Interchange-plus via an independent ISO: the grown-up answer past ~$20k/month, or the day commercial work becomes a real line of business.

If you go the ISO route: get the quote in writing, ask about statement fee, PCI fee, batch fee, and monthly minimum, and never sign an early-termination fee. ClaroPro pairs bilingual voice-to-invoice with payments — the invoice, the photos, and the text-to-pay link leave the driveway together.

How a duct cleaner actually wires this up: notes from Finix's public docs

Finix publishes its developer documentation in the open at docs.finix.com. Translated into a duct cleaner's week:

• Payment Links by text — no integration. Generate the link from the dashboard, text it with the before-and-after photos. The "check is coming" customer pays from the couch before the van leaves the street.
• Invoices with line items and photos. Vent count, dryer vent, sanitizer — each a line, photos attached. The documented invoice is the dispute-proof invoice.
• Partial payments. The commercial client pays half at booking, half on completion — tracked on one invoice, not two spreadsheets.
• Refunds cost you twice. POST /refunds returns the money, and Stripe and Square keep the original processing fee. On a $480 job that's $14.22 gone even when you do the right thing. Authorize-and-capture on deposits exists to avoid exactly this.
• Webhooks close the loop. Finix fires an event when the payment settles, so the job is marked paid without anyone checking a bank feed.

The catch: Finix is infrastructure — you get its rails through a provider built on top. No-code tools work from the dashboard; API flows need a developer. Test at finix.sandbox-payments-api.com first. More at finix.com; the public docs live at docs.finix.com.

FAQ

Cheapest way to take a $1,500 commercial payment? ACH — about $5 flat, 3–5 days to settle. Get the bank details once.

A customer says the work wasn't done. Now what? The photo-documented invoice is your answer: before-and-after vent photos, GPS timestamps, the signed scope. That's the documentation layer in Tech for Air Duct Cleaning — it isn't paperwork, it's dispute insurance.

Should I offer financing? Duct jobs rarely clear the financing threshold — skip it. Save financing talk for the day you sell full HVAC replacements.

Cash discount or surcharge? Dual pricing — legal in all 50 states, no bans to track. Surcharging is banned in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Will switching processors interrupt business? One-week overlap: old account live, new charges on the new one, never cancel before the first deposit lands.

The processor decision is worth about $1,800 a year at 800 jobs; the same-day-collection decision is worth more. Invoice with photos, link in the text, ACH for the commercial jobs. Then read Tech for Air Duct Cleaning for the route-density stack, and AI for Air Duct Cleaning for the trust machine.