A flat fee is software. A percentage is a tax.
That's the index card stuck to my monitor. It's also the whole MerchantLayer thesis. Stop losing margin to the middlemen. Start banking it.
Why we built this
I run a Shopify store. Like a lot of merchants, I 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 my 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 I built the stack I 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 else in the payments stack takes a percentage instead: the processors, the BNPL providers, even the fee-recovery apps. Percentages work because you never feel them. A flat monthly fee you feel once. 6% of a $3,000 order is $180 you don't notice 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. Everything we ship, you get on the plan you're already paying for.
- 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 security posture.
- Answer support tickets in US business hours with a human.
- Give you the stack we wish we'd had back when we were writing 2.9% + $0.30 checks every month.
I built this for my own store first. Hitched was paying card processors, BNPL providers, and a stack of fee apps on every order, and nothing on the App Store solved it in a way I would trust with my own checkout. So we wrote it ourselves.
The code running MerchantLayer today is the same code running Hitched's checkout. Before we submitted the app to the Shopify App Store, we put over $1 million of real Hitched orders through it. The result: thousands of dollars in payment fees stay with the business every month instead of going to processors and middlemen.
You don't have to take my word for it. The rates are published, the math is easy to check, and I run my own store on the same software you'd be installing.
Try the stack on your store
Install MerchantLayer once (early access now, App Store listing coming soon), then switch on whichever of FeeLayer, PayLayer, and FinanceLayer you actually need. 14-day free trial.
One app. Three modules.
Card fees, no bank-transfer option, BNPL taking a cut of your biggest orders. One module each. Stack all three for flat pricing with no volume caps.