The subscription is the small number
Search for landscaping invoice software and you get a wall of storefronts, and every one of them sells you on the same promise: send the invoice faster, get paid faster. What almost none of them do is tell you what getting paid actually costs.
That is the wrong way round. On a normal residential maintenance book, the software subscription is a few hundred dollars a year. The payment processing on the money that flows through it is four to eight times larger. The subscription is printed in 48-point type on the pricing page. The processing rate is often not printed anywhere.
This page prices the whole stack on one concrete book of business, using rates read first-hand from each vendor on 16 August 2026. Every number below is either published by the company or derived from published numbers with the arithmetic shown. Where a company does not publish something, that is stated as the finding rather than filled in with an estimate.
Three numbers are worth having before you read anything else, all of them on the same 60-client mowing book:
- $259.20 a season sits in how often you invoice, and it costs nothing to collect.
- $1,344.38 a season sits in which payment rail you offer.
- On a $2,000 commercial invoice, the same payment costs $5.00 or $58.30 depending on nothing but the tool you sent it from.
What is actually on this results page
Before the rates, the shape of the market. The organic results for this term are nine vendor pages, two threads of landscapers asking each other what to use, and a couple of blog round-ups. The demand signal is people asking; the supply is people selling.
So the first useful audit is not which tool is best. It is which of these companies will tell you, on the page they rank with, what you will pay when a customer taps a card.
| Tool | Subscription (read 16 Aug 2026) | Processing rate published? |
|---|---|---|
| Square | Free plan; paid tiers exist | Yes - full public rate table by plan and payment type |
| Jobber | Core $29/mo annual, $49/mo month-to-month, 1 user, +$29/mo per extra user | Yes - card, tap and bank rates on the pricing page |
| LawnPro | Solo free; Startup $39/mo ($29 annual); Grow $129/mo ($99 annual); Plus $249/mo ($199 annual) | No rate on the pricing page |
| Billdu | Lite $7.99/mo ($4.99 annual); Standard $14.99 ($9.99); Premium $27.99 ($19.99) | No rate on the pricing page |
| Zoho Invoice | $0, capped at 500 invoices/yr, 2 users, 3 projects | No rate on the pricing page |
| Harvest | Free for 1 seat / 2 projects; Teams from $9 per seat/mo | No rate on the pricing page |
| Aspire | Not published - quote only | No |
Two of seven publish the number that will cost you the most. That is not an accusation of bad faith; a general invoicing tool like Zoho or Harvest genuinely does not set the rate, because you bring your own Stripe or PayPal account and pay whatever that account charges. But the effect on the buyer is identical either way: you can compare subscriptions in thirty seconds and you cannot compare the real cost at all.
Credit where it is due, and it matters here: Jobber and Square both publish complete rate tables, including the awkward rates. Jobber names its bank-transfer rate on the same page as its plan prices. Square publishes a rate grid that shows its free plan costing more per transaction than its paid ones, which is not a flattering table to publish. Those two made this article possible.
The rates, read first-hand
Every figure in this table was read from the vendor's own site on 16 August 2026. Rates change; check them before you commit.
| Rail | Stripe (direct) | Jobber Payments | Square Free | Square Plus / Premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Online card | 2.9% + $0.30 | 2.9% + $0.30 | 3.3% + $0.30 | 2.9% + $0.30 |
| Card on file / keyed | +0.5% on manual entry | not separately published | 3.5% + $0.15 | 3.5% + $0.15 |
| Tap / in person | 2.7% + $0.05 | 2.7% + $0.30 | 2.6% + $0.15 | 2.5% + $0.15 (Plus) |
| Bank transfer (ACH) | 0.8%, capped at $5.00 | 1%, no cap published | 1%, $1 minimum | 1%, $1 min, capped at $10 |
| Extra layer | 0.4% capped $2.00 on post-payment invoices via Stripe Invoicing | +1% for instant payout | - | - |
Two things in that table are worth stopping on, because they run against what most people assume.
Square's free plan is not the 2.9% everybody quotes. An invoice paid online on Square Free is 3.3% + $0.30. The 2.9% rate is a paid-plan rate. That is a 0.4 percentage-point difference that lives entirely inside the word "free."
The card-on-file rate is higher than the ordinary card rate, on every Square plan. 3.5% + $0.15 to charge a card you already have on file. For a business built on recurring visits, card on file is the natural way to bill - and it is the most expensive percentage on the sheet. More on exactly where that flips below, because it does flip.
The book we are pricing
Rates in the abstract are useless. Here is the standing example this site uses so the numbers stay comparable from one article to the next:
- 60 residential clients, weekly mowing, 32-week season, about eight months of billing
- $52 per visit, so 1,920 visits and $99,840 of season revenue
- 60% of clients pay by card - 36 of the 60 - and the rest pay by cheque or cash
- Card volume is therefore $59,904 a season
That 60% is an assumption and it is doing real work, so it is stated plainly rather than buried. If your book is 90% card, scale every processing figure below by 1.5. If it is 30% card, halve them. The ranking of the options does not change; the size of the prize does.
If you want the rest of that book costed out - labour, insurance, the mower note, break-even - it is worked through in the numbers a landscaping business plan should actually contain.
Lever one: how often you invoice
Every card rate has two parts, a percentage and a fixed fee. The percentage does not care how you slice the money. The fixed fee is charged per transaction, so it cares enormously.
Bill after every visit and 36 card clients generate 1,152 transactions of $52. Bill monthly and the same clients generate 288 transactions of $208. Identical revenue, identical percentage, one quarter of the fixed fees.
| Billing frequency | Transactions | Percentage part | Fixed part | Season total | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| After every visit | 1,152 x $52 | $1,737.22 | $345.60 | $2,082.82 | 3.48% |
| Monthly | 288 x $208 | $1,737.22 | $86.40 | $1,823.62 | 3.04% |
| Difference | 864 fewer | $0.00 | $259.20 | $259.20 | 0.44pp |
$259.20, and there is no assumption doing the work. It is 864 transactions multiplied by thirty cents. It is not a strategy, it is not a growth hack, and anyone selling it as one is overselling: on a $99,840 book it is a quarter of one percent of revenue. But it is free, it takes one settings change, and it recurs every season. The mechanics of moving a recurring book onto monthly billing - and the cash-flow trade you make when you do - are covered in how to bill recurring landscaping clients.
Lever two: the payment rail, which is worth five times as much
Here is the number that should have been on every page of that search results page and was on none of them.
A monthly invoice of $208 costs $6.33 to collect by card. The same invoice collected by bank transfer costs $1.66 on Stripe's published ACH rate, or $2.08 on the 1% that Jobber and Square charge.
| Rail on a $208 monthly invoice | Rate | Per invoice | Season (288 invoices) | Effective |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Card, Square Free | 3.3% + $0.30 | $7.16 | $2,063.23 | 3.44% |
| Card, standard | 2.9% + $0.30 | $6.33 | $1,823.62 | 3.04% |
| Card on file | 3.5% + $0.15 | $7.43 | $2,139.84 | 3.57% |
| ACH, Jobber or Square | 1% | $2.08 | $599.04 | 1.00% |
| ACH, Stripe rate | 0.8%, $5 cap | $1.66 | $479.23 | 0.80% |
Moving a monthly book from card to bank transfer saves $1,344.38 a season. Doing both levers - monthly instead of per-visit, bank instead of card - takes the cost of getting paid from $2,082.82 to $479.23. $1,603.58, which is four to eight times the annual subscription of every tool in this article.
The honest catch, and it is a real one: you cannot make customers use ACH. Bank transfer is slower to set up, some customers will not hand over routing details, and card is what people reach for. The realistic play is not to eliminate cards; it is to make bank transfer the default option on the invoice and card the second one, and to bother doing this for the four or five biggest accounts rather than for all sixty. Which leads to the case where it stops being a rounding error entirely.
One commercial invoice, four prices
Everything above is small because $52 and $208 are small. Send a single $2,000 commercial maintenance invoice and the same rates produce a spread that is not small at all - because two of them have a cap and two of them do not.
| Method | Rate | Cost of one $2,000 invoice | vs cheapest |
|---|---|---|---|
| Card on Square Free | 3.3% + $0.30 | $66.30 | 13.3x |
| Card, standard rate | 2.9% + $0.30 | $58.30 | 11.7x |
| ACH, Jobber (no cap published) | 1% | $20.00 | 4.0x |
| ACH, Square Plus | 1%, capped $10 | $10.00 | 2.0x |
| ACH, Stripe rate | 0.8%, capped $5 | $5.00 | 1.0x |
Same payment, same money, same day - $5.00 or $58.30 depending on which tool you sent it from. And notice where the difference comes from. It is not the headline percentage; 1% versus 0.8% is nothing. It is the cap. Stripe stops charging at $5.00, Square Plus stops at $10.00, and Jobber publishes no cap on its 1%, so on a $2,000 invoice it charges $20.00 - four times Stripe's number on a rate that looks a fifth of a percent apart.
Caps are the single most under-read line in payment pricing, and they are invisible until your invoices get large. If you are chasing commercial work - and the case for it is made in how to get commercial landscaping contracts - the cap on your bank-transfer rate deserves more attention than the entire subscription decision.
The card-on-file trap, and the exact ticket where it flips
Recurring services push you toward card on file: the customer authorises once, you charge automatically, nobody chases anybody. It is the right workflow. It is also priced differently, at 3.5% + $0.15 rather than 2.9% + $0.30, and whether that is good or bad for you comes down to one number.
Set the two costs equal - 2.9% of the ticket plus $0.30 against 3.5% plus $0.15 - and the crossover is exact:
- Against the standard 2.9% + $0.30 rate, card on file is cheaper below a $25.00 ticket and dearer above it.
- Against Square Free's 3.3% + $0.30, the crossover is $75.00.
So on a $52 mowing visit charged to a stored card at the standard rate, you pay $1.97 instead of $1.81. Sixteen cents. Across 1,152 visits that is $186.62 a season - real, and comfortably less than what the automation is worth if it stops you chasing a single cheque a week. On Square's free plan the sign flips: at a $52 ticket, card on file is cheaper than that plan's own online rate.
The generalisable point: a lower fixed fee with a higher percentage is a bet on small tickets. Bill per visit and card on file is close to free. Bill monthly at $208 and the same choice costs you $316.22 a season. The rate that is right for you depends on a decision you made somewhere else entirely - how often you invoice - and no pricing page mentions that the two are connected.
The 1% layer, and why free software is not free
There is one more cost that lives above all of this: the software's own cut, charged on top of whatever the processor charges. It is the least visible line in the stack because it does not appear on a pricing page - it appears in a terms of service.
Yardbook, the free incumbent in this category, states it plainly in its terms, read again today:
"In addition to transaction fees charged directly by Stripe, you will also be charged a processing fee by Yardbook. This fee will be automatically deducted from each online payment from your customers to you. The Yardbook processing fee for non-premium accounts is 1% of each transaction. This fee also applies to any free trial accounts. For premium paid accounts (Business Plan and Enterprise Plan), this fee is waived." - Yardbook Terms of Service
On this book that 1% is $599.04 a season. Billed per visit, it sits on top of $2,082.82 of Stripe fees for a total of $2,681.86 - an effective 4.48%. Yardbook's Business plan at $34.99/mo waives it, so the free plan costs $599.04 and the paid plan costs $419.88 a year. Past roughly $3,499 of card volume a month, the free plan is the expensive one.
One correction in the interest of consistency: our own Yardbook pricing breakdown prices this same fee at $998.40 a season. That figure assumes every dollar of the book arrives by card; this page assumes 60% does. Same clause, same rate, different card share - and the card share is the assumption doing the work in both. Neither number is wrong; take the one that matches your book.
Two things to say for balance. First, 1% is the smallest number in this stack. The card processor's percentage is 2.9 times it. Nobody should switch software over 1%, and the useful reading of that clause is not "Yardbook is expensive" but "the free tier has a price and it is written in a document you did not read." Second, this is a disclosed fee in a public document - which puts Yardbook ahead of the four tools above that disclose nothing at all.
What a subscription is actually worth
Now the subscription question can be asked properly, because it is not "which is cheapest" - it is "does this monthly fee buy back more than it costs in processing?"
Square is the cleanest worked example, because it is the same company charging two different rates. Its free plan takes 3.3% on an invoice, its paid plans take 2.9%. On $59,904 of card volume, that 0.4 percentage points is $239.62 a season, or $29.95 a month.
So the paid plan pays for itself at any subscription below $29.95 a month, and costs you money above it - on this book, at this card volume, before any feature is considered. The subscription price for Square's paid invoicing tier was not stated on the fees page consulted for this article, so that break-even is offered as the test to apply rather than as a verdict on Square. Run your own card volume through it: break-even monthly fee = 0.004 x your monthly card volume.
Here is the full stack, same book, monthly billing, card only, so the comparison is like for like:
| Setup | Subscription/yr | Processing/season | Total cost of getting paid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho Invoice or Harvest free + your own Stripe | $0 | $1,823.62 | $1,823.62 |
| Landscapey annual + Stripe at published rates | $199.99 | $1,823.62 | $2,023.61 |
| Jobber Core, annual billing, one user | $348.00 | $1,823.62 | $2,171.62 |
| Yardbook Business (1% waived) | $419.88 | $1,823.62 | $2,243.50 |
| Yardbook free plan (1% applies) | $0 | $2,422.66 | $2,422.66 |
| LawnPro Startup, annual billing | $348.00 | rate not published | not computable |
Read that table honestly and the spread across every real option is about $600 a season - roughly six mowing visits. The subscription decision is not where the money is. The money is in the two levers above, which are available on almost any of these tools, and in whether the thing saves you an hour a week of admin, which is worth more than the entire table.
Where we sit, stated plainly because you should be suspicious of a software company's own comparison table: Landscapey runs payments through Stripe Connect with direct charges and no platform fee, so you pay Stripe's published rate and we add nothing on top. That is not a cheaper processing rate than Jobber's - it is the same 2.9% + $0.30. The difference is only that there is no additional layer, which is a claim about what we do not do rather than a discount. Our plan is $19.99/mo or $199.99/yr, listed on the pricing page with no quote form.
The honest counterweights
Four things that cut against the argument above, printed because leaving them out would make this page the same kind of article as the ones it is criticising.
Stripe direct is not automatically a flat 2.9%. If you use Stripe Invoicing itself to send the invoice, Stripe charges 0.4% capped at $2.00 per invoice on post-payment invoices, on top of the card rate. On a $208 monthly invoice that is $0.83, or $239.62 a season - almost exactly the Square Free-to-Plus gap. Software that generates the invoice itself and simply charges the card avoids that layer, which is a genuine point in favour of using a landscaping tool rather than raw Stripe.
A percentage is a percentage. None of the differences here compound, none of them grow with your business in any interesting way, and all of them are dwarfed by pricing your work correctly. A single $3 increase per visit across 60 clients is $5,760 a season - three and a half times the biggest lever on this page. If you have not raised prices this year, do that first; there is a template for the conversation in the lawn care price increase letter.
Rates are not the only cost of a payment method. Cheques are free to process and expensive to chase: a cheque that arrives eleven days late has cost you more in float and phone calls than the $1.81 you saved. This article prices fees, not collection risk, and collection risk usually points the other way.
Every figure here has a date on it. Payment rates change with card network interchange, and several of these companies revised their pricing within the last year. Read the rate before you sign, not the article.
What none of them publish
Having read seven pricing pages closely, the gaps are consistent enough to be worth listing. None of the tools reviewed publishes:
- An effective rate on a realistic book. Everyone publishes percentages; nobody publishes what a 60-client mowing route actually pays in a season, which is the only form of the number a landscaper can act on.
- The interaction between billing frequency and fixed fees. The $259.20 above is arithmetic anyone could do, and no vendor does it, because it does not sell anything.
- Cap disclosure alongside the rate. Square publishes its ACH cap. Jobber publishes a 1% ACH rate with no cap stated either way, which is not the same as confirming there is none - the honest reading is that the page does not say.
- Refund and chargeback fee handling. Whether the percentage comes back to you on a refund varies by processor and is nowhere on any of these landing pages.
- What happens to your data and your customers' stored cards if you leave. Card-on-file portability is a real switching cost on a recurring book and no page mentions it.
If you are moving off spreadsheets, the sequence that costs least is: pick monthly billing, turn on bank transfer, and only then argue about which logo is on the invoice. The template question - what the invoice should actually say - is a separate and much easier problem, covered in the landscaping invoice template round-up. And if your books live in QuickBooks already, the integration question is worth settling before the software question: see landscaping software with QuickBooks integration.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest way to accept payment for a landscaping invoice?
Bank transfer, by a wide margin, and it is not close. On the 60-client book above, collecting monthly by ACH at Stripe's published 0.8% costs $479.23 a season against $1,823.62 by card - a saving of $1,344.38. The gap widens further on large invoices because ACH rates carry caps and card rates do not: a $2,000 invoice costs $5.00 by ACH at Stripe's rate and $58.30 by card.
Is free landscaping invoice software actually free?
The subscription is; the payments may not be. Yardbook's terms of service state a 1% processing fee on non-premium accounts, charged on top of Stripe's fees and waived on paid plans - which on this book means the free plan costs $599.04 a season in fees the paid plan does not charge. Square's free plan charges 3.3% + $0.30 on an invoice against 2.9% + $0.30 on its paid tiers. Tools like Zoho Invoice and Harvest are genuinely free at the subscription level but connect to your own processor, so you pay that processor's standard rate.
Should I invoice after every visit or once a month?
Monthly, if your cash flow can carry it. Identical revenue split into 288 monthly invoices instead of 1,152 per-visit ones pays the same percentage and one quarter of the fixed per-transaction fees - $259.20 less per season on this book. The trade is cash-flow timing: you wait an average of two extra weeks for the same money, which is a real cost if your season is tight.
Why is the card-on-file rate higher than the normal card rate?
Because a stored card is a card-not-present transaction with a different risk profile, so it prices like keyed entry rather than like a tap. Square charges 3.5% + $0.15 for it on every plan. The lower fixed fee means it is cheaper on small tickets and dearer on large ones, with the crossover at exactly $25.00 against a 2.9% + $0.30 rate. On a $52 mowing visit it costs about sixteen cents more, which most operators will happily pay for automatic collection.
Do I need landscaping-specific invoice software, or will a general tool do?
A general tool will send an invoice perfectly well. What it will not do is generate the invoice from a route, know that a client has had four visits this month, or stop a visit being billed twice - which is the actual job on a recurring book. If you have fewer than about fifteen clients, a general invoicing tool plus a spreadsheet is honestly fine. Past that, the recurring-billing logic is where the time goes, not the document.
How much should a landscaping business budget for payment processing?
Between 0.8% and 4.5% of the money that arrives electronically, depending entirely on rail and stack. On the book above, the realistic range runs from $479.23 a season (monthly, bank transfer) to $2,681.86 (per visit, card, on a platform charging its own 1%) on the same $59,904 of card volume. A reasonable planning figure for a card-heavy residential book billed monthly is 3% of card revenue, with the note that it is a line you can move rather than a fixed cost you inherit.
Sources and limits
Sources. All rates and prices were read directly from the vendors' own public pages on 16 August 2026: Stripe's pricing page (2.9% + $0.30 online, 0.8% ACH capped $5.00, 0.4% capped $2.00 on post-payment Stripe Invoicing); Jobber's pricing page (Core $29/mo annual, $49/mo month-to-month, plus 2.9% + $0.30 card, 2.7% + $0.30 tap, 1% bank transfer); Square's public fee schedule (3.3% + $0.30 online on Free, 2.9% + $0.30 on paid tiers, 3.5% + $0.15 card on file, 1% ACH with a $10 cap on paid tiers); LawnPro, Billdu, Zoho Invoice and Harvest pricing pages for subscription figures; and Yardbook's terms of service for the 1% clause, quoted verbatim above and re-read on the day of publication.
Limits. The 60-client, $52-per-visit, 32-week book is a modelling convention used across this site so that articles stay comparable - it is not survey data, and your book will differ. The 60% card-collection share is an assumption and is the single largest driver of every dollar figure here; it is stated in the text at each point it matters. Where a vendor does not publish a rate, no rate has been estimated and the row is marked not computable rather than filled in. Jobber's ACH rate is published without a cap; the absence of a stated cap is reported as an absence, not as confirmation that none exists. Square's paid-tier subscription price was not present on the fee page consulted, so the break-even is given as a formula rather than a conclusion. Interchange-driven rate changes are frequent enough that any figure here should be re-checked against the vendor's page before it is used in a decision.
If you want the invoicing, the route, the recurring schedule and the payment in one place without a quote form or a percentage on top of Stripe's, start a free trial of Landscapey - or read how the bookkeeping side fits together first.