Shift4 Fees Surpass 97% CAGR But Are Still Undercounted

Nothing screams your business is dying louder than massive fee increases at every opportunity.

Particularly when you’re perfectly hedged to inflation.

Granted, Stripe, modern processor who’s still growing 30% annually, charges an outrageous amount of money for basic features (how about an additional 100 bps for recurring payments, anyone?), but they’re not cramming fees on their customers.

Yet

If you want a masterclass is how to screw your customers, Shift4 breaks the mold.

First, we love that Shift4’s fees are paid all the time.

Not once a year.

Just whenever Shift4 feels like they need to juice earnings.

Merchants were eager to share just how much the Shift4 thievery increases at every opportunity.

The evidence.

We also love how Shift4 bills per TID (terminal) and not per MID.

This is good ol’ throwback payments abuse where you can just multiply fees aggressively. We know a ton of merchants who get pummeled with this accounting.

Merchants will usually have multiple terminals, which multiplies the financial damage from fees many times over.

Shift4 went from made up Regulatory Compliance Fee to Regulatory Assurance Fee.

Then we get to May 2024. 

Guess what? Time for a new fee.

Now we get an Annual Fee, again charged per TID because if you’re going to add a fake fee better really get the most mileage you can.

October comes again.

Better increase that fee from last year.

$129.99 -> $189.99 is a 46.16% increase.

Anyone want to guess what inflation was for 2024?

Anyone?

It was 2.9%.

Forget that the merchant probably raised their prices 2.9% to combat inflation, making Shift4’s take home perfectly indexed to that increase.

Apparently not enough when you’ve got rockets to fly.

New year, new changes.

And all of them bad with Shift4.

This message was delayed and released in June this time.

We guess the guy responsible for cooking up the May nonsense was busy thinking about his space voyage and lost track of time.

Whoops.

Now we’re really cooking.

The Annual Fee that we first saw 12 months ago was $99 up to a maximum of 2 TIDs per MID.

Oh yea?

Well how about we issue a 1100% increase, you piece of shit merchant?

We’ll increase the fee itself 152.53% from $99 to $250.

BUT.

Let’s make sure we can apply to even more terminals. 

Why stop at 2 when we can go to 4?

Best case for merchants is now a measly 152.53% increase.

Worst case is a 305% increase.

That’s a very reasonable 113x the 2025 US rate of inflation. 

But we can’t be done.

Need to increase fees at least twice a year.

Or else.

Our Regulatory Whatever I Want to Call It Fee is now $325, up from 189.99, or a tame 71.06% CAGR.

But we again expanded the number of devices.

Instead of a banal 2 TIDs per MID, we’re now going to apply it to, we don’t know, 3 TIDs per MID.

Can we do that?

Oh yea, our contracts strip all our customers of any vestige of protection, so why not?!

That’s a nice 106.59% price increase.

And by the way, it’s not like Shift4 is cramming margin into just these few fees – look at this shit:

Lord knows how many other fees these poor merchants are suffering under.

Then we get to the fee that became popular on the internet: the $2,000 aggregation of Who Cares and So What fees?

Hard to say how much of a price increase this is since it depends on how many terminals a Shift4 merchant had, but let’s just plot the CAGR of Shaft4’s fees from 2023 assuming a merchant had 2 terminals.

Look at this beauty.

The CAGR on JUST THESE FEES has been 97.41% since 2023.

You have any idea how insane that is?

The best performing hedge fund of all time returns a paltry 66% by comparison.

Top decile investors start returns at 20% IRR.

Shift4 blows all these numbers away, and who knows how many other fees or deceptive tactics we’re missing.

Padded interchange.

Not refunding interchange.

It’s Friday fee.

Shift4’s CAGR might actually be substantially higher than this already-unfathomable number.

And it’s not even winter yet.

If history tells us anything, we bet Shift4 issues another fee before the year closes.

Not to mention rumors of Shift4 toiling fastidiously to eliminate required notifications for fee increases altogether.

How low is the bar that merchants are actually signing with this company?

No comment from Shaft4: they’re too busy counting money to bother replying.