A flat fee is software. A percentage is a tax.
That's the index card stuck to the founder's monitor. It's also the entire MerchantLayer thesis. Stop losing margin to the middlemen. Start banking it.
Why we built this
We run a Shopify store. Like most merchants, we watched three slow bleeds every month:
- The card fee bleed. 2.9% + $0.30 on every order. On a $500 average order, that's about $14.80 of margin gone, before paying for the product, the shipping, or the email flow that brought the customer in.
- The BNPL bleed. Affirm and Klarna convert nicely on large orders, but they take 4–6% on top of the card fee. A $1,500 pay-in-4 order can cost $90 to the BNPL provider alone. "Layaway" customers were our least profitable.
- The ACH gap. Shopify launched native ACH bank transfers in October 2025, but locked it to Shopify Plus B2B checkouts. If you're a regular Shopify merchant with a retail customer who says "can I just wire you?", your only honest answer is "no, use the card and we'll both eat the fee."
So we built the stack we wished existed.
Three modules
Stacked together, they turn a 6–9% "percentages" problem into a sub-1% problem.
The thesis
Software should charge you a flat monthly price for a job done well. Everyone in the payments stack, processors, BNPL providers, even the fee-recovery apps, charges percentages. That's because percentages are invisible. A flat monthly fee you feel once. 6% of a $3,000 order is $180 you don't see until the deposit doesn't match the order total.
Flat pricing, forever. FeeLayer $9, FinanceLayer $9, PayLayer $9, or $25 for the Suite bundle. No 2% of your savings. No upgrade when you hit $10K MRR. No volume caps. No tiers.
What we won't do
- No percentage takes. Ever. The day we start taking a cut of your savings is the day we've become the thing we built this to replace.
- No tiered pricing to punish growth. Same flat rate at $1K/mo GMV as at $10M/mo GMV. No volume caps.
- No feature gating on the core value prop. Every feature ships on the single plan.
- No data resale. Your customer list is yours. We don't train models on it, we don't sell it, we don't look at it.
What we will do
- Ship on Shopify's latest architecture (and retrofit when Shopify ships something better).
- Publish our changelog and our security posture.
- Answer support tickets in US business hours with a human.
- Give every merchant the stack we wish we'd had when we were writing 2.9% + $0.30 checks every month.
I started MerchantLayer because Hitched, my own Shopify store, was bleeding margin to a fee stack we never asked for. Card processors, BNPL middlemen, surcharge apps stacked on every order. So I built the suite I wished existed.
Today the same code that runs Hitched's payment stack runs MerchantLayer. We processed hundreds of thousands of dollars through it on real Hitched orders before opening the app to the Shopify App Store. Hitched now saves thousands of dollars in payment fees every month, money that used to walk out the checkout to processors and BNPL middlemen and third-party fee apps.
I'm not asking you to trust me on it. I'm asking you to trust the math, the architecture, and the fact that I run my own store on the same software I'm asking you to install.
Try the stack on your store
Install MerchantLayer once from the Shopify App Store, then enable any combination of FeeLayer, PayLayer, and FinanceLayer from inside the app. 14-day free trial.
One app. Three modules.
Recover every dollar lost to processing fees. Stack all three for flat pricing with no volume caps.