Nickel vs. Square

Square is a payments company built around the point of sale, and its invoicing product inherits that model. Square Invoices is free to use: you send an invoice or estimate by email or text, and your customer pays by card or bank transfer. Card payments on the free plan cost 3.3% plus 30¢ (2.9% plus 30¢ on the paid Plus and Premium tiers), and ACH costs 1% with a $1 minimum. Invoices Plus, at $20 a month, caps the ACH fee at $10 per payment. Square caps ACH at $50,000 per transaction.

Payouts arrive the next business day, or instantly for 1.95%. For paying vendors, Square Bill Pay sends ACH and paper checks for free from Square Checking and charges 2.9% for card payments, with daily limits that start at $5,000 and rise to $50,000 once an account is established. Square syncs one way into QuickBooks Online through Intuit's connector, and offers unlimited team members, with custom permission sets on a paid Team Plus add-on.

Nickel is built for the invoice, not the register. You send payment links and invoices, your customers pay by ACH, card, or check, and the money lands in your bank or in Nickel Balance. On the payable side you onboard vendors through a secure link and pay them by ACH, card, wire, or check, with approval routing on paid plans. It syncs two ways with QuickBooks Online and Desktop.

ACH is unlimited and free on every plan, with no minimum and no cap on volume. The $0 Core plan includes 3 users and a $25,000 per-transaction limit; Plus ($35/month) raises that to $1M per transfer, twenty times Square's ACH ceiling. Cards are a flat 2.9% with no per-transaction cents, and you choose whether you or your customer covers the fee. Live chat and email support are included on every plan, and there is no POS hardware because there is no checkout.

Two documented limits. The first is size: Square's help center puts the cap per ACH transaction at $50,000, so a $60,000 progress payment has to go by card, at 2.9% to 3.3%, or be split across transfers. The second is risk review. Square's payment-limits FAQ says that sudden changes in the number or size of payments you take may result in a payment limit, and its reserves FAQ describes rolling reserves that set aside a percentage of card payments, reviewed after a minimum of six months. Those policies make sense for a retailer with thousands of small tickets. For a contractor whose normal month is twenty large invoices, the spike is the business.

Nickel's infrastructure is designed around exactly that pattern: large, infrequent, invoice-based payments between businesses. We can't promise a suspicious payment will never be reviewed, but the baseline assumption is that a $40,000 ACH is normal, not an anomaly. See how the numbers play out for cabinet makers and HVAC contractors, or compare Nickel with QuickBooks Payments and Bill.com.

On bank transfers, by a lot. A contractor collecting 20 invoices a month averaging $8,000 by ACH pays Square 1% on each: $80 an invoice, $1,600 a month, $19,200 a year. With Invoices Plus the fee caps at $10 per payment, so the same month costs $200 in fees plus the $20 subscription. On Nickel it costs $0, and because every invoice is under Core's $25,000 limit, no paid plan is needed. Square makes ACH free only if you deposit into Square Checking.

Cards are closer than the marketing suggests. On Square's free plan, 20 card payments of $8,000 cost $5,286 (3.3% plus 30¢ each); on Plus, $4,646. On Nickel at 2.9% flat, $4,640, and you can pass the fee to the customer and pay $0. Square's genuine advantages: in-person POS, a free plan with unlimited users, and a card rate on paid tiers within a few dollars of Nickel's. Full details are on our pricing page. Square's are on squareup.com, and every Square figure on this page was checked against Square's own fee and help pages on August 28, 2026.