The short version: Cheddar Up's Basic plan is free forever and charges 3.95% + $0.95 per card payment, which on a $25 order is $1.94, or 7.8%. Pro is $15 a month paid annually and drops that to 3.59% + $0.59, saving 45¢ an order. So Pro pays for itself at about 34 orders a month, and above that the free plan is the more expensive one. The bigger lever is eCheck: Pro charges 1.59% with a $1 minimum and Team charges a flat $0.95, against 3.59% plus 59¢ on cards. On a $200 order that is $0.95 against $7.77. Basic does not offer eCheck at all.
Figures came from Cheddar Up's own pricing page, read column by column in a browser in July 2026.
Three published tiers, and the money is in the processing rather than the subscription.
| Cheddar Up | |
|---|---|
| Subscription | Basic $0 free forever · Pro $15/mo paid annually · Team $35/mo paid annually. A Partner tier also exists |
| Free trial | Not needed. Basic is free forever with no time limit |
| Platform fee | $0. There is no separate platform fee; the revenue is in the processing rate. Fees can be configured to be paid by the payer instead of you |
| Card processing | Basic: 3.95% + $0.95. Pro: 3.59% + $0.59. Team: 3.59% + $0.59. eCheck: not available on Basic, 1.59% (min $1.00) on Pro, flat $0.95 on Team. Standard bank withdrawal is free on every plan; instant withdrawal is 1.95% with a $1 minimum |
The 95¢ fixed fee on Basic is the number to notice. Fixed fees hurt small orders disproportionately, and most food orders are small.
That fixed-fee arithmetic is worked through at real order sizes below. If most of your orders sit under $30, a flat-subscription storefront with 2.9% + $0.30 processing will usually beat every row in this table, and the break-even section shows exactly where.
Because a 95¢ fixed fee on a small order is enormous, and food orders are usually small.
Worked at three order sizes on Basic's 3.95% plus $0.95:
Compare that to a common 2.9% plus 30¢ storefront rate, which costs 60¢ on a $10 order, $1.03 on a $25 one, and $3.20 on a $100 one. Cheddar Up's free plan is more than twice as expensive on small orders.
That is not a criticism of the pricing so much as a statement about what it is built for. Cheddar Up is a group payment collection tool, and the payments it was designed around are larger: a $180 registration fee, a $75 team kit, a $250 trip deposit. At those amounts the 95¢ barely registers.
For a food vendor selling $8 loaves, it registers enormously.
The instant-withdrawal line is worth a glance for the same reason. Standard bank withdrawal is free on every plan, and instant withdrawal costs 1.95% with a $1 minimum. On a $1,000 payout that is $19.50 to get your money a couple of days early, which is an expensive habit if it becomes the default. Use it when cash flow genuinely requires it and take the free option the rest of the time.
At about 34 orders a month, and the arithmetic is worth seeing.
Pro costs $15 a month and saves you 0.36 percentage points plus 36¢ on every card payment. On a $25 order that is a saving of 45¢.
$15 ÷ $0.45 = 33.3 orders a month.
Worked at three volumes, all at $25 an order:
The break-even moves with order size, because the 36¢ portion of the saving is fixed. At a $50 average order it drops to about 28 orders a month; at a $10 average it rises to about 38.
The practical rule: under 30 orders a month, stay on Basic. Over 40, buy Pro. In between it barely matters.
This is the largest saving on the page and most people never look at it.
eCheck, meaning a direct bank debit rather than a card, is priced completely differently:
On Pro, an eCheck beats a card once the order is over roughly $29. Below that the $1 minimum makes the card cheaper. Above it, the gap widens fast:
On Team's flat 95¢, the saving is bigger still: a $200 eCheck costs 95¢ against $7.77 on a card, a difference of $6.82 on one order.
Which means Team at $35 a month makes sense for a specific business: large orders, paid by bank transfer. If you take twenty $200 orders a month by eCheck, Team saves you about $2.23 per order against Pro, or $44.60 a month, against a $20 monthly difference. It pays for itself at about nine orders a month at that size.
The catch is getting customers to use it. Most people default to a card, and eCheck asks for bank details, which some customers dislike. If your buyers are wholesale accounts, schools, or offices, they will often prefer it. If they are individuals buying bread, they will not.
There is a second benefit worth naming for wholesale sellers: an eCheck request creates a clear paper trail and a specific due date, which is more than an emailed invoice does. Our piece on what to do when a wholesale account pays late covers the follow-up, and a payment method that logs itself makes that conversation considerably easier.
Treasury's guidance on ACH is a reasonable primer on how those bank transfers actually move, which is worth understanding before you offer it as an option.
Yes, and Cheddar Up makes this configurable, which is unusual and worth thinking about carefully.
Passing fees on means your customer sees the order total plus a processing line. Your own cost drops to zero and theirs rises by 7.8% on Basic or 6% on Pro at a $25 order.
Whether that works depends entirely on context:
Given Cheddar Up's rates are high for retail, passing fees on is doing more work here than it would on a 2.9% platform. On a $25 order you are asking a customer to pay $26.94, which is noticeable.
The middle path most vendors land on is passing fees for large or group orders and absorbing them on small retail ones. Cheddar Up's configurability makes that possible rather than all-or-nothing.
Worth being clear, because the fee structure only makes sense once you know.
Cheddar Up is built for collecting money from a group: club dues, team registrations, school fundraisers, trip payments, ticketing, sign-up sheets. The product is a form and a payment collection page, not a shop.
That said, Cheddar Up has genuinely relevant capability for food. Cheddar Up's own plan pages list inventory tracking, item variations, shipping, taxes, promo codes, waitlists, countdown timers, a point-of-sale with tap-to-pay on a phone, and QR ticketing. It also accepts Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, eCheck, cash, and checks, which is a wider set than most storefronts.
So where it genuinely fits a food business:
Where it fits badly is a recurring retail business selling small items week after week. Our comparison of Cheddar Up against Google Forms for food orders covers the collection-tool use case in more detail.
At $1,000 a month across 40 orders of $25, all card payments:
Cheddar Up costs roughly $250 to $300 a year more than a standard storefront at this volume, and that gap is entirely in the processing rate.
Reverse the assumptions and it flips. At 10 orders a month of $200, all by eCheck on Team: $420 in subscription plus $114 in processing is $534 a year, against a 2.9% storefront's $120 plus $732, which is $852. Cheddar Up wins by over $300 because eCheck on large orders is genuinely cheap and card processing on large orders is genuinely expensive.
So the honest summary: Cheddar Up is expensive for many small card payments and cheap for few large bank payments. Work out which describes you before comparing anything else.
The quickest way to settle it is to take your last hundred orders, note the average value and the payment method, and run both rate cards over them. That takes ten minutes in a spreadsheet and beats any general advice, including this. If you also want to know what a flat-fee storefront would have cost on the same hundred orders, running a week through one gives you a third real number rather than a third estimate.
Keeping records straight matters more than usual here, because payments arrive by card, eCheck, cash, and check, and reconciling four methods is where small businesses lose track. The IRS's recordkeeping guidance covers what you are expected to retain and for how long.
If your actual problem is recurring local orders rather than group collection, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it does not do group collection. There are no sign-up forms, no registrations, no ticketing, no eCheck, and no fee-passing configuration. If you are running a fundraiser or collecting from a club, Cheddar Up is built for that and a storefront is not. If you are selling the same products every week, you can put one week of orders through both and compare the totals directly.
Basic is free forever, Pro is $15 a month paid annually, and Team is $35 a month paid annually. The real cost is in processing: 3.95% plus 95¢ on Basic, and 3.59% plus 59¢ on Pro and Team.
Because of the 95¢ fixed fee. On a $25 order, Basic's 3.95% plus 95¢ comes to $1.94, or 7.8%. A standard 2.9% plus 30¢ rate would cost $1.03 on the same order.
At about 34 orders a month at $25 each, where the 45¢ per-order saving covers the $15 subscription. Under 30 orders, Basic is cheaper. Over 40, Pro is.
Only for eCheck-heavy businesses with large orders. Team's flat 95¢ eCheck beats Pro's 1.59% above about $60 an order, and at $200 orders it pays for itself at roughly nine payments a month.
On Pro at 1.59% with a $1 minimum, and on Team at a flat 95¢. Basic does not offer it at all. On orders above about $29, eCheck is cheaper than a card on Pro.
Yes. Cheddar Up lets you configure who pays. That works well for group collections and wholesale, and poorly for retail food sales where the buyer is comparing you against alternatives.
Not really. It is built for group payment collection, and its card rates are high for many small orders. It is genuinely good for bake sales, fundraisers, event pre-orders, and wholesale invoicing by eCheck.
Cheddar Up's free plan is the expensive one. At 3.95% plus 95¢, a $25 order costs you 7.8%, and Pro's $15 a month pays for itself at about 34 orders. If you are using Basic and taking more than forty payments a month, you are paying for the privilege of not paying a subscription.
The genuinely good deal here is eCheck. On Pro it is 1.59%, on Team a flat 95¢, and on a $200 order that is $0.95 against $7.77 on a card. If your buyers will pay by bank transfer, Cheddar Up becomes one of the cheapest ways to take large payments anywhere.
Just be clear about what it is. This is a group collection tool with real food-relevant capability bolted on, not a storefront. For a bake sale, a fundraiser, or wholesale invoicing it is a strong choice. For selling the same six products every Saturday, the rates are working against you.
