Payments for Alarm & Security: What Stripe, Square, and the Big Processors Actually Cost You

A security dealer's valuation is its RMR — and its RMR is leaking. Every month, stored-card fees and silent declines shave dollars off each $45 account, and across a couple thousand accounts that drip becomes a flood. Stripe, Square, Adyen, Chase Payment Solutions, Fiserv, Global Payments, and Worldpay all price recurring billing like it's a retail sale that happens to repeat; it isn't, and the difference shows up in the one row that matters most in this trade. Rates checked October 2026. Also see Alarm & Security, AI for Alarm & Security, and Tech for Alarm & Security.

The fee table — read the RMR row first

Skip straight to the first row. In every other trade the big-ticket rows are the story; here, the $45-a-month row is the whole valuation. Then read the install rows, which behave like every other trade's big tickets.

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 = 0.3% markup estimates.

$45/month RMR (card on file): Square $1.73/mo · Stripe $1.83/mo · Interchange-plus ~$1.10/mo · ACH ~$0.36/mo

$1,500 residential install (reader, in-person): Square $39.15 · Stripe $40.55 · Interchange-plus ~$31.50

$3,000 camera system (invoice online): Square $87.30 · Stripe $87.30 · Interchange-plus ~$63

$10,000 commercial install: Square keyed $350.15 · Stripe online $290.30 · Interchange-plus ~$210 · ACH (0.8%, capped at $5) $5.00

Now stare at the RMR math, because nobody else will: 2,000 accounts at $45 a month cost $41,400 a year on Square's stored rate, $43,920 on Stripe's, ~$26,400 on interchange-plus, and ~$8,640 on ACH. Moving RMR from Square's stored rate to ACH saves ~$32,760 a year — the single biggest line item in this trade, bigger than any install. The rails underneath are the same everywhere — companies like Finix build the payments infrastructure every processor rides on; the spread is what you're really shopping for.

Two more rows your statement hides. The $150 service call, card present: Square $4.05, Stripe $4.10, interchange-plus ~$3.15. And the costs no rate table shows: chargebacks at $15–$25 per dispute on most processors — and in this trade, RMR disputes are the chargebacks — plus the junk fees bank-led ISOs stack: statement fees ($10–$15 a month), PCI non-compliance fees, batch fees. You don't haggle these down; you pick the provider that doesn't charge them.

Where RMR leaks, and how to plug it

• Move RMR to ACH. $0.36 per $45 charge on ACH versus $1.83 on Stripe's stored rate. Convert half your 2,000 accounts and you keep ~$17,640 a year. Cards stay as the backup method, not the default.
• Turn on Account Updater. Cards get reissued; RMR doesn't notice until it declines. Automatic card refresh is the difference between a 3% decline rate and a 1% one — on 2,000 accounts, that's 40 accounts a month you keep instead of chase.
• Build a dunning sequence, not a hope. Day-0 text, day-3 nudge, day-7 consequence, day-14 human call — with a one-tap card-update link at every step. The big processors hand you a decline webhook and wish you luck; the sequence is yours to build.
• Take deposits on installs. 50% upfront on residential installs, more on commercial — before the equipment is ordered. Stripe and Square hand you a generic payment link with no deposit-versus-balance tied to the proposal.
• Enroll autopay at the door. The install invoice plus the autopay enrollment should leave as a text while the tech is still in the driveway. Every install that leaves without autopay enrolled is an account you'll chase later.
• Price the stored rate on service plans. Annual service agreements on card-on-file: Stripe 3.4% + $0.30 and Square 3.5% + $0.15 run ~$10.65 on a $300 plan versus ~$7 on interchange-plus. Fine if you chose it; expensive if you didn't notice.
• Watch the on-site key-in. Reader dies at the commercial site and you type the card: Square jumps to 3.5% + $0.15 — $350 instead of $210 on the $10,000 install.
• ACH the commercial installs. $5 flat on $10,000 versus $350 keyed, settled in 3–5 days.
• Don't trip the freeze. Square's aggregated-risk model holds funds when your pattern breaks — a $10,000 commercial install after a month of $45 RMR charges is the textbook trigger.
• Dual price, don't surcharge. Surcharging is legal in most states, banned in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Dual pricing — a cash price and a card price, both displayed — is legal in all 50 states. And never lease a terminal: a $300 reader at $49 a month for 48 months is a $2,352 reader.

RMR billing questions, answered

Cheapest way to bill $45-a-month RMR? ACH — about $0.36 per charge. Keep cards as the backup method for the accounts that won't switch, not as the default.

Will switching processors interrupt business? Not with a one-week overlap: old account live, new charges on the new one, never cancel before the first deposit lands. Migrate RMR accounts in batches and confirm the first successful charge per batch before moving the next.

Should I offer financing on camera systems? If the ticket clears $500, yes — the $3,000 camera system becomes a monthly number. Point-of-sale options like Wisetack (invoices $500–$65,000) integrate with the field-service platforms dealers already use, and you get paid in full when the job's done.

Cash discount or surcharge? Cash discount — legal in all 50 states, no bans to track. Surcharging is banned in Connecticut and Massachusetts and capped by card-brand rules elsewhere; dual pricing (a cash price and a card price, both displayed) gets you the same math with none of the compliance.

What if a customer disputes six months of RMR? Documentation wins chargebacks: the signed 36-month agreement, the autopay enrollment record, the service history, the text thread showing the dunning notices. That's the photo-documentation layer in Tech for Alarm & Security — it isn't paperwork, it's dispute insurance.

How a security dealer actually wires this up: notes from Finix's public docs

Recurring billing at dealer scale is an infrastructure problem, and Finix's public docs are the clearest public blueprint for it:

Card on file — tokenization. 2,000 accounts on autopay; you never store a single card number. Finix's Tokenization Forms embed a PCI-compliant form (Web, iOS, or Android SDK) in your page or app. The card number lives only inside Finix's iframe; your server gets a token starting with "TK" and creates a Payment Instrument — the stored-card object — on the customer's Identity via POST /payment_instruments. Monthly RMR charges the stored instrument; Account Updater refreshes the card when the bank reissues it — the difference between a 3% decline rate and a 1% one.

Deposits without a developer. Payment Links you text the homeowner — no integration — and Invoices with partial payments. Your 50% deposit on the $3,000 camera system: half now, balance on install day.

Authorize now, capture when done. POST /authorizations holds funds on the $3,000 estimate — reserved, not taken. Tech finishes: POST /authorizations/{id}/captures. Cancels: POST /authorizations/{id}/void. No charge-and-refund — refunds cost you the original fee on most processors.

Refunds cost you twice. POST /refunds sends the money back — and Stripe and Square don't return the original processing fee when you refund. That $3,000 camera-system refund costs you the ~$87 fee on top of returning the money. Authorize-and-capture exists precisely to avoid this.

Webhooks close the loop. Finix fires an event when the payment settles — and when a charge declines — so your billing system triggers the dunning sequence automatically and marks paid invoices without anyone checking a bank feed.

The catch: Finix is infrastructure — no Square-style signup. No-code tools work from the dashboard; API flows need a developer — test at finix.sandbox-payments-api.com first. You get the rails through a provider built on top, the way your monitoring runs on networks you didn't build.

So which processor, then?

Square is fine for a one-tech dealer at $5k a month. Outgrow it by $15k a month, your first $10,000 commercial install, or your first 500 RMR accounts — the stored rate will eat the RMR before you notice.

Stripe is great online and a poor fit for a dealer: recurring billing bolted onto a developer platform. Your dunning sequence matters more than their API.

Adyen is enterprise; no returned calls under ~$1M a year.

Chase Payment Solutions, Fiserv, Global Payments, and Worldpay are quote-based and bank-led, with zero security-dealer guidance. Fine if you negotiate hard; miserable if you sign unread.

Built-in dealer-platform payments (AlarmBiller, SedonaOffice, ServiceTitan) are convenient and Square-priced — fine for year one, but watch the stored-card rate on RMR from day one.

Interchange-plus via an independent ISO, with ACH for RMR is the grown-up answer past 500 accounts. Get the interchange-plus quote in writing and ask about the four line items that turn a good rate into a bad deal: statement fee, PCI compliance fee, batch fee, monthly minimum. Never sign an early-termination fee (often several hundred dollars), and never lease the terminal.

ClaroPro pairs bilingual voice-to-invoice with payments — the install invoice and the autopay enrollment text leave the driveway the same day.

The processor decision is worth roughly $15,000–$33,000 a year depending on how much RMR you move to ACH; the billing decision — dunning that actually runs, deposits on installs, autopay enrolled at the door — is worth more. AI for Alarm & Security shows the voice-to-paid workflow. Once a year, run this fee table against your own last 12 months of statements; processors count on you never doing the arithmetic. Re-check these numbers yearly.