Buy it, rent it or lease it. The hardware is the small number on the page; the term, the monthly minimum and the exit fee are the large ones.
A card reader for a small UK shop starts at £19 to £29 plus VAT if you buy it outright, and the three companies that sell the cheap ones charge between 0.99% and 1.75% per transaction. The money is not in the hardware. It is in what the contract does after the first year: the term you signed, the monthly minimum, and what it costs to leave.
The Payment Systems Regulator set limits on card-acquiring contracts after its market review: an initial term of no more than 18 months, and after that a contract that either ends or rolls on notice of no more than 31 days, for merchants up to £10m of annual card turnover. Those limits are about the acquiring contract. A machine on a finance agreement is a different piece of paper, and the 18 months do not follow it there.
Read off their own product pages on 16 Sep 2026. Prices exclude VAT where the provider says so, and these are list prices: nothing here is a quote for your shop.
| Provider | Cheapest reader | Counter-top device | Per transaction | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SumUp | Solo Lite £15, list £25 | SumUp Terminal £99, list £135 | 1.69% pay-as-you-go | £0, or £19 for Payments Plus |
| Zettle by PayPal | PayPal Reader from £29 for a first reader, £69 after that | Reader and dock from £58 | 1.75% on all cards | £0 |
| Square | Square Reader £19 + VAT | Square Terminal £149 + VAT, or £25 + VAT a month for six months | 1.75% in person, plus 1.5% on cards issued outside the UK | £0 for the reader |
Two details worth carrying into a call with any of them. SumUp’s Payments Plus plan at £19 a month cuts the in-person rate to 0.99%, but only for domestic consumer cards: business cards, international cards and American Express stay at 1.69%, and online sales are 2.50%. Zettle charges one rate, 1.75%, on every card it accepts. Square also quotes 1.75% in person, and adds 1.5% on top when the card was issued outside the UK, which matters more in a tourist town than in a suburb.
SumUp’s own page says Payments Plus is the better deal above £3,300 of monthly sales. Work it out yourself and the plain number is lower: the plan saves 1.69% minus 0.99%, which is 0.7% of turnover, and £19 divided by 0.007 is £2,714. The gap is VAT. Add 20% to the £19 and the plan costs £22.80, and £22.80 divided by 0.007 is £3,257, which rounds to the figure on their page.
So both numbers are honest, and they answer different questions. If you can reclaim the VAT, your break-even is around £2,700 a month. If you cannot, it is around £3,300. And either way the saving only applies to the cards the discount covers, so a shop that takes a lot of business or foreign cards crosses that line later than the arithmetic suggests.
A two-site coffee shop takes £9,000 a month on cards, almost all of it domestic debit. The machine came free with the account, and the statement shows a £15 monthly minimum per site and £11 of terminal rental. That is £41 before a single sale is counted, or 0.46% of turnover on top of the headline rate.
Bought outright at the list prices above, two counter-top devices would have cost about £300 once. The free machine reached that in seven months and kept going.
The shop is invented, the structure is not: the monthly minimum and the rental are the two lines that most often turn a cheap headline rate into an expensive year. Both appear on your statement, and both belong in your effective rate.