Haley Duster

Background

Haley Duster researches and writes about card payment acceptance for UK sole traders and small businesses. She built PaymentCardReader.co.uk to make card reader pricing legible: published rates converted into the cost of a real trading month, with the assumptions on show rather than buried.

The site exists because card reader pricing is unusually hard to compare honestly. Providers publish a headline percentage, then differ on the things that actually decide your bill: whether a fixed pence charge is added to every sale, whether commercial and international cards are priced separately, whether there is a monthly plan fee, when money lands, and what happens to the rate once you pass a turnover threshold. Two readers advertised within a tenth of a percent of each other can cost noticeably different amounts to the same business.

Every recommendation here therefore starts from a modelled cost for a described business — turnover, average transaction value, card mix — rather than from the advertised rate. The calculators published on the site are the same models used to write the verdicts, exposed so you can put your own numbers in and check the reasoning instead of taking it on trust.

Areas of focus

• UK card acceptance pricing and effective-rate analysis
• Small business payment hardware and connectivity
• Editorial standards for commercial and referral content

Most working time goes on three things: rechecking published pricing against providers' own documentation, maintaining the cost models behind the comparison tables, and rewriting pages when a provider changes terms. Promotional offers are rechecked most often, because they change fastest and cause the most harm when they go stale.

How I work

Primary sources first. Pricing claims come from the provider's own published pricing or terms; regulatory points come from the FCA, the Payment Systems Regulator or the ICO rather than from secondary reporting. Where a figure cannot be sourced to an official document, it is either described qualitatively or left out.

Every product page states the case against the product as plainly as the case for it, and names a competitor where one fits a described business better. Where a page carries a commercial link, that relationship is disclosed above the link rather than in the footer. The full standards are set out in the editorial policy and the review methodology, and both are meant to be held against the work.

Disclosure

Haley Duster operates this site as an independent Tide referral partner and may receive a commission on eligible applications. She is not employed by Tide and holds no position that depends on a reader choosing Tide.

No provider is given sight of a page before publication, and none has editorial approval over anything published here. Commission rates play no part in ranking, and a commercial relationship does not create a right to have criticism removed.

Corrections and provider queries go to editor@paymentcardreader.co.uk, and are handled under the corrections policy.

Recent work

• Tide Card Reader hubStandard and Plus compared.
• Compare providersTide, SumUp, Square and Zettle.
• Card reader fee calculatorEffective rate modelling.
• How fees workEvery line on the bill.