Stripe Terminal for a WooCommerce store costs three things stacked together. There is Stripe’s in-person processing rate of 2.7% + 5¢ per tap, a one-time reader cost (from $59 for the M2 up to $299 for the S700), and a POS layer that connects Terminal to WooCommerce — Jovvie starts at $39/month with no extra per-transaction Terminal fee. There is no monthly fee from Stripe itself. For a store running $20,000/month in card-present sales on a single S700 reader, that lands at roughly $612/month all-in once you amortize the hardware — and almost every published “Stripe Terminal fees” guide stops at the first line and never gives you that total.
Key Takeaways
- Three stacked costs, no Stripe monthly fee. Stripe’s 2.7% + 5¢ per tap, a one-time reader, and a POS layer (Jovvie from $39/mo). Stripe charges no monthly, setup, or minimum fee.
- In-person beats Stripe’s online rate. 2.7% + 5¢ card-present vs 2.9% + 30¢ online — cheaper on every ticket, and 25¢+ lower on the fixed fee alone.
- Readers are one-time, from $0 to $299. Tap to Pay $0, M2 and WisePad 3 $59, WisePOS E $249, S700 and S710 $299 — current 2026 prices; older $349/$499 S700 figures are outdated.
- Jovvie adds no per-transaction fee. The POS layer is a flat $39/mo licence; nothing changes as your volume grows.
- A $20k/mo store lands near $612/mo. About 3.06% all-in once the reader is amortized — and moving keyed or web sales to in-person taps usually lowers your blended cost.
- Connect adds a line only for platforms. If you take payments for sub-merchants, add the platform’s application fee; single-store owners can ignore it.
We build Stripe Terminal point-of-sale deployments on WooCommerce for a living — Jovvie has shipped in-person payment flows for retail, restaurants, pop-ups, and multi-location operators across more than 30 countries, and we operate our own Stripe Connect platform at payments.bizswoop.app. So the numbers below are not scraped from a rate card and hand-waved; they are the same figures we model when a store owner asks us “what will this actually cost me per month.” The fee-explainer articles quote 2.7% + 5¢ and a reader price and stop. A WooCommerce store owner needs the whole stack: rate, plus the POS license that makes Terminal work inside WooCommerce, plus hardware, plus — if you are a platform or reseller — the Connect application fee. This guide models all four.
This is a cluster piece in our Stripe Terminal for WooCommerce library. If you want the hardware in isolation, see the Stripe Terminal hardware costs guide on BizSwoop. And once you have priced it, connecting WooCommerce to Stripe Terminal takes about 30 minutes.
How much does Stripe Terminal cost for a WooCommerce store?
A WooCommerce store pays Stripe 2.7% + 5¢ per in-person transaction, a one-time hardware cost, and a POS/bridge license (Jovvie from $39/month) — with no separate monthly fee from Stripe. That is the whole cost structure, and the only variable that changes with your volume is the processing rate.
Here is the full landed-cost model at a glance. Everything else in this article is detail on one of these four lines.
| Cost line | What it is | 2026 figure | Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe processing rate | Card-present rate charged per transaction | 2.7% + 5¢ per tap (Stripe) | Per transaction |
| Reader hardware | The physical card reader | $59 (M2) – $299 (S700/S710) | One-time |
| POS / bridge license | The software that connects Terminal to WooCommerce | Jovvie from $39/month | Monthly |
| Connect application fee | Only if you are a platform taking payments for sub-merchants | Set by the platform (e.g. 0.5%) | Per transaction |
Most single-store WooCommerce merchants only touch the first three lines. The fourth applies to agencies, franchises, and marketplaces — and it is the line no competing article models, so we cover it in full below.
The Stripe processing rate: 2.7% + 5¢ in person
Stripe charges 2.7% + 5¢ for every in-person (card-present) transaction in the US, and there is no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no minimum to use Stripe Terminal. You pay the rate on what you sell and nothing when you are idle.
This is the number every guide quotes, and it is correct — Stripe’s own pricing page lists 2.7% + 5¢ for in-person payments. What most guides omit is the comparison that makes it meaningful. Stripe’s online rate is 2.9% + 30¢. Card-present is cheaper on both the percentage and the fixed fee, and the gap widens the smaller your ticket. That matters for a WooCommerce store because you are almost certainly already paying the online rate for web orders, and the same Stripe account bills the lower in-person rate the moment a customer taps a reader at your counter.
Is Stripe Terminal cheaper than online Stripe payments?
Yes — for the same sale, Stripe Terminal’s 2.7% + 5¢ in-person rate is cheaper than Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢ online rate on essentially every ticket, and dramatically cheaper on small ones. The fixed fee alone is 25¢ lower per transaction.
| Sale amount | Online (2.9% + 30¢) | In person (2.7% + 5¢) | You save in person |
|---|---|---|---|
| $10 | $0.59 | $0.32 | $0.27 |
| $25 | $1.03 | $0.73 | $0.30 |
| $50 | $1.75 | $1.40 | $0.35 |
| $100 | $3.20 | $2.75 | $0.45 |
| $250 | $7.55 | $6.80 | $0.75 |
The practical read: if you sell in person at all, taking that payment through Terminal rather than keying it into an online checkout saves money on every single transaction. On a $20,000/month card-present volume with a $40 average ticket (500 transactions), the difference between the two rates is about $85/month — enough to cover most of a Jovvie license on its own.
Reader hardware costs in 2026: M2, WisePOS E, S700, and the new S710
Stripe Terminal hardware is a one-time cost that ranges from $0 (Tap to Pay on a phone you already own) to $299 for the flagship smart readers, and 2026 brought a new cellular reader — the Stripe Reader S710 — at the same $299 as the S700.
Hardware pricing is where a lot of ranking articles are simply out of date, still quoting the historical $349 S700 MSRP or, in a few cases, a wrong $499 figure. Here are the correct, current 2026 prices, drawn from Stripe’s Terminal device lineup:
| Reader | Best for | Screen | Connectivity | Price (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tap to Pay | Phone-only, lowest cost | Your phone | Uses the phone | $0 |
| Stripe Reader M2 | Simple counter or mobile pairing | None | Bluetooth | $59 |
| BBPOS WisePad 3 | On-device PIN entry | Small | Bluetooth | $59 |
| Stripe Reader S700 | Standalone smart POS reader | 5.5“ | Wi-Fi | $299 (S700) |
| Stripe Reader S710 | Smart reader where Wi-Fi is unreliable | 5.5“ | Wi-Fi + built-in cellular | $299 (S710) |
| BBPOS WisePOS E | Countertop smart reader | 5“ | Wi-Fi | $249 |
Two things worth flagging. First, the S700 is a 5.5-inch Wi-Fi smart reader at $299 — if a source tells you it is a 7-inch $499 device, that source is wrong. Second, the S710 is new for 2026: the same 5.5-inch smart reader as the S700 but with a built-in cellular radio, so it keeps taking payments at a market stall, a food truck, or a job site where Wi-Fi drops. Cellular data may be billed separately in some regions, but the device itself is $299. For a fixed WooCommerce store counter, the S700 is the natural pick; if you sell at pop-ups or events, the S710 earns its keep.
For most WooCommerce merchants the honest recommendation is one S700 per checkout point. If you want the full hardware decision tree, our hardware costs guide breaks it down reader by reader.
The WooCommerce POS layer: what Jovvie adds and what it costs
Stripe Terminal is an API and a set of readers, not a point-of-sale system — so to take an in-person payment against a WooCommerce order, you need a POS/bridge layer, and Jovvie provides that from $39/month with no extra per-transaction Terminal fee.
This is the line the fee-explainers wave at and never pin down. They will say “you may need a third-party POS app, roughly $30–$100/month” and move on. Here is the concrete answer for WooCommerce. Stripe Terminal on its own gives your developers an SDK; it does not give a store staff member a screen where they ring up a cart, tap the reader, and post the sale back to the same WooCommerce order and inventory the web store uses. That connective layer — cart, reader control, order sync, receipts, inventory — is what a WooCommerce POS does, and it is what Jovvie is.
Jovvie POS starts at $39/month. Critically, Jovvie does not add its own per-transaction fee on top of Stripe’s 2.7% + 5¢ — you pay Stripe’s rate and the flat Jovvie license, and nothing else changes as your volume grows. That is the honest number to plug into your model: $39/month, not a vague range. Because Jovvie is WooCommerce-native, the in-person sale writes to the same product, order, and inventory records as your online store, so you are not reconciling two systems at the end of the day. See current tiers on the Jovvie pricing page.
Modeling the real monthly cost?
Jovvie is a flat $39/mo POS licence with no per-transaction Terminal fee on top of Stripe’s rate — so your in-person cost is Stripe’s 2.7% + 5¢ plus one predictable line.
Start your free trial →Connect application fees: the extra cost line for platforms and resellers
If you are a platform, agency, or franchise taking Stripe Terminal payments on behalf of other merchants, a Connect application fee is an additional cost (or revenue) line layered on top of Stripe’s processing rate — and it is the one cost no fee-explainer models.
Most single-store owners can skip this section. But if you run WooCommerce for multiple sub-merchants — a franchise HQ, an agency managing client stores, a marketplace — you are almost certainly operating on Stripe Connect, and Connect changes the economics. On Connect, the platform can set an application fee on each transaction: an amount the platform collects from the connected account, on top of Stripe’s processing rate. Stripe documents the mechanics in its Connect application fees reference.
The point that matters for a pricing model is directional: the sub-merchant’s true cost is Stripe’s 2.7% + 5¢ plus the platform’s application fee. If you are the platform, that fee is your revenue for having put the merchant on the hardware; if you are the sub-merchant, it is a real line in your cost of acceptance that you should ask about before signing. We run exactly this model on our own Connect platform at payments.bizswoop.app, and the full mechanics are in our Stripe Terminal application fees guide. The takeaway for this article: if anyone is taking a cut between you and Stripe, add that line to the model below.
A worked example: total monthly cost for a $20k/month in-person WooCommerce store
For a WooCommerce store running $20,000/month in card-present sales on one S700 reader with a Jovvie license, the all-in monthly cost is about $612 once hardware is amortized — roughly 3.06% of card-present revenue.
This is the model no ranking article builds, so here it is, line by line. Assume 500 in-person transactions/month at a $40 average ticket, one S700 reader amortized over a conservative 3-year life, and a Jovvie license.
| Cost line | Calculation | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe processing (2.7%) | 2.7% × $20,000 | $540.00 |
| Stripe per-transaction (5¢) | $0.05 × 500 | $25.00 |
| Jovvie POS license | Flat, from | $39.00 |
| S700 reader (amortized) | $299 ÷ 36 months | $8.31 |
| Total | ~$612.31/month | |
| Effective all-in rate | $612.31 ÷ $20,000 | ~3.06% |
A few honest notes on that number. The reader is a one-time $299 — after month one it is a sunk cost, and the “amortized” line just shows its true monthly weight; in a straight cash-out month one you pay $299 up front and ~$604/month thereafter. If you already run a WooCommerce store, you were paying Stripe’s online 2.9% + 30¢ on any keyed or web sales; moving those to in-person taps drops both the percentage and the fixed fee, so Terminal usually lowers your blended cost of acceptance rather than adding to it. And if you are on Connect, add the platform’s application fee to the effective rate.
The reason we model it this way — and the reason this piece exists — is that “how much does Stripe Terminal cost for a WooCommerce store” has a real, specific answer, and every published guide gives you a rate and a reader price and leaves you to do the arithmetic yourself. Above is the arithmetic.
Frequently asked questions
Does Stripe Terminal have a monthly fee?
No. Stripe does not charge a monthly fee, setup fee, or minimum to use Stripe Terminal — you pay only the 2.7% + 5¢ in-person rate per transaction (Stripe pricing). The only recurring cost for a WooCommerce store is the POS/bridge license (Jovvie from $39/month), which is a Jovvie charge, not a Stripe one.
How much are Stripe Terminal card readers?
As of 2026: the Stripe Reader M2 is $59, the BBPOS WisePad 3 is $59, the BBPOS WisePOS E is $249, and the Stripe Reader S700 and the new cellular S710 are both $299 (S700, S710). Tap to Pay on a phone you already own is $0. These are one-time hardware costs.
Is Stripe Terminal cheaper than online Stripe payments?
Yes. In-person is 2.7% + 5¢ versus 2.9% + 30¢ online, so Terminal is cheaper on essentially every ticket and saves 25¢ or more per transaction on the fixed fee alone. Small tickets benefit the most.
Do I need a paid plugin to use Stripe Terminal with WooCommerce?
Effectively yes — Stripe Terminal is an SDK and readers, not a ready-made WooCommerce POS, so you need a POS/bridge layer to ring up carts and post sales back to WooCommerce orders and inventory. Jovvie provides that from $39/month with no extra per-transaction Terminal fee. You can build directly on Stripe’s SDK yourself, but that is a development project, not a plugin install.
What does a WooCommerce POS cost per month?
A WooCommerce POS that connects to Stripe Terminal starts at $39/month with Jovvie. Competing guides quote a vague “$30–$100/month” for third-party POS apps; the concrete figure for a WooCommerce-native, Terminal-ready POS with no added transaction fee is $39/month. See the Jovvie pricing page.
Are there extra fees for Stripe Terminal on WooCommerce?
The only mandatory costs are Stripe’s 2.7% + 5¢ rate, the one-time reader, and the POS license. There is no extra Terminal surcharge from Stripe. The one additional line that can appear is a Stripe Connect application fee — but that only applies if you take payments on behalf of other merchants as a platform or reseller.
Price it once, price it right
If you are choosing a POS layer for Stripe Terminal on WooCommerce, the cost model above is the honest one — and we would rather you run the numbers for your own volume than take a headline rate at face value. If you want a second set of eyes on your specific stack (volume, ticket size, number of counters, whether Connect is in the picture), book a pricing consult with our team. We build these deployments for a living, and we will tell you plainly whether Terminal on WooCommerce pencils out for your store — and what it will actually cost per month.
Sources: Stripe pricing · Stripe Terminal devices · Stripe Reader S700 · Stripe Reader S710 · Stripe Connect application fees · Jovvie pricing
