The Problem
When free stopped being free
Lightbulb Rentals keeps independent film and photo productions supplied. Operating as The Lightbulb Grip & Electric Co. LLC out of a Brooklyn headquarters with shops in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the company rents camera, lighting, grip, and studio equipment to everyone from students shooting their first project to the crews behind World Cup commercials and Cardi B shoots.
Megan Fields is the company’s Business Administrator, which at a company this size means she also handles HR and every payment that goes out the door. Two categories dominate: sub-rentals, where they rent gear from other rental houses when their own inventory is already out on jobs, and independent contractors, from the business development lead who submits commissions to the part-timers.
For over a year, that ran through Melio on a free account. Then the terms changed.
All of a sudden, with zero warning, you couldn’t send any payments for free. You had to have a minimum. And you could only send 20 ACH payments per month with that.
Megan Fields, Business Administrator
The cap was the problem. Some months Lightbulb sends 25 or 30 ACH payments. Most months it is closer to 40 or 50. A plan that stopped at 20 was not a plan at all, and the monthly minimum arrived on top of it.
The pricing change also cost Melio something harder to win back. Megan came away from the experience feeling misled about what the free account actually offered, and once that trust was gone, so was the reason to stay.
The Solution
A workhorse that has lived up to it
Megan started looking for an ACH processor that was actually free. Between a recommendation from her CFO and her own searching, she landed on Nickel, and the switch happened before Melio’s new pricing ever hit the account.
It was under a month. I want to say we found Nickel within two weeks. I don’t think I ever actually paid them.
Megan Fields, Business Administrator
Her first reaction to Nickel’s pricing was the same one most people have.
I remember having that “this is too good to be true” thought. But so far you all have lived up to everything you said you would, and that’s really cool.
Megan Fields, Business Administrator
Paying a vendor now takes about two minutes. Adding a brand new vendor and paying them takes five. Megan sends an ACH request form to a contractor, gets it back, uploads the invoice, and submits the payment. There is no payment run schedule because there does not need to be one. Sub-rentals and contractor invoices get paid as they come in, and the QuickBooks Online connection handles the rest.
What Megan comes back to most, though, is what happens when she needs something. Her early bills kept tripping Nickel’s duplicate detection, because commission payouts arrive with no invoice number and sub-rental descriptions tend to open with the same few words. Rather than asking her to change how she works, Nickel adjusted the rule on its end and the payments went through.
The same was true when the platform defaulted to Lightbulb Rentals’ sales account instead of its operating account. She asked, and support fixed it.
They’re perfect. They’ve always been very nice, very helpful, very supportive. It’s easy to get a real person and not just an AI chatbot.
Megan Fields, Business Administrator
Nearly two years in, that consistency is the thing she notices. Megan handles payments for a company with three locations and a headcount that swings with the season, on top of running HR. What she needs from a payments platform is for it to work every time and to get out of the way, and to have someone answer when it does not.
Nickel has just been running. It’s a workhorse. The few bumps and hiccups I’ve had have been optimized for me.
Megan Fields, Business Administrator
She is not shopping around, either.
I’m completely content. I’m very happy with Nickel, so I haven’t been cheating and looking around.
Megan Fields, Business Administrator
