About Card Machine Pricing
Card Machine Pricing publishes one thing: what UK card machine providers print about their own prices. Every rate and every hardware price on this site is quoted verbatim from the provider's own page, carries the day it was read, and is re-fetched and matched before it ships - a page that has repriced fails the build rather than shipping a stale cell. Around the index sit guides to the four machine types and what actually moves a quote.
Why this site exists
Because this market is unusually hard to compare and unusually easy to misrepresent. Five of the seven providers here print a rate; two print none at all, and a comparison site that filled those two cells with numbers lifted from worked examples or from a client-side calculator would be inventing prices for the two biggest names on the shelf. Saying so is more useful than a complete-looking table.
Who it is for
UK businesses choosing or switching a card machine or a till system, from a market stall to a restaurant group
Not people looking for a merchant account abroad, and not developers integrating a payments API - both are different products with different prices
What it does not do
- No invented rate. Where a provider publishes none, this site says so and names what its page does say instead.
- No blended effective rate. The printed rates rest on different bases, so each is shown as printed and the page says what it rests on; a derived number rendered as though a provider published it is what this index exists to replace.
- No pay-to-appear. No provider can buy a position or change a figure, because every figure is its own published words.
- No ranking of what is not published. This site does not name a best EPOS system for a restaurant, because doing so would mean ranking prices nobody publishes.
What is on this site
4 guides, each with its sources on the page , 102 answers to the questions around them , and the comparison.
- Mobile card reader: A mobile card reader is the cheapest way into card payments: a handheld device that pairs with a phone or tablet over Bluetooth and charges a percentage of each sale with no monthly fee.
- Countertop card machine: A countertop card machine is the fixed unit beside the till, wired to the network or a phone line.
- Portable card machine: A portable card machine is the unit that leaves the counter: table service, a trade counter, a market stall, a van.
- EPOS till system: An EPOS till system is the software layer above the card machine: the menu or the stock file, the staff logins, the reporting and, in hospitality, the table plan and the kitchen printer.
Where the figures come from
GB card-machine pricing verified against each provider's own published pages on 2026-09-10 by infra/ingest/hubs/cardmachinepricing.co.uk/ingest_vendors.py: every quoted figure re-fetched and matched verbatim (hash-pinned). 11 of 32 providers print an in-person rate; 10 (paymentsense, teya, stripe, adyen, takepayments, lloyds-cardnet, utp, nexi, global-payments, handepay) print none and are listed with that fact.
Who answers for it
Joseph Ellul, Operator, Card Machine Pricing.
Reach us
Contact for a question about the site, or quotes@cardmachinepricing.co.uk. The legal terms are on Terms and Privacy.