What taking card payments actually costs you

Most practice software is vague about this, and the vagueness is not accidental. So here is the whole thing, with numbers.

The short version

When a patient pays you by card through Movari, two deductions happen before the money reaches your bank account:

1. Stripe's processing fee. Stripe's published UK rate is 1.5% + 20p for standard UK cards, 2.8% + 20p for premium UK cards, 2.5% + 20p for EEA cards and 3.15% + 20p for international, with a further 2% if a currency conversion is involved. These are Stripe's rates, not ours, so check their pricing page rather than trusting a figure in an article, because they change.

2. Movari's platform fee: a flat 50p. Not a percentage. Fifty pence per successful patient payment, regardless of whether the payment is £30 or £300.

Everything else in Movari is included in the £29 per practitioner per month. There is no other metered charge anywhere in the product.

What that looks like in practice

A £50 appointment paid on a standard UK card:

Patient pays	£50.00
Stripe (1.5% + 20p)	−£0.95
Movari platform fee	−£0.50
You receive	£48.55

That is a total cost of £1.45, or 2.9% of the transaction.

A month with 80 card payments averaging £50: roughly £76 in Stripe fees and £40 to Movari, against £4,000 collected. Add the £29 subscription and your total software-and-payments cost for the month is about £145.

Because the platform fee is flat rather than a percentage, it is proportionally heaviest on small payments and negligible on large ones. On a £20 payment it is 2.5%; on a £150 initial assessment it is 0.3%. If your work is mostly higher-value appointments, this structure is in your favour. If you take a lot of very small payments, it is worth doing the sum.

Why we charge it at all, and why it's flat

The honest answer to why at all is that connected payments carry real cost and real liability, and pretending otherwise would mean recovering it somewhere less visible: a higher subscription for everyone including physios who take payments elsewhere, or a percentage that quietly scales with your success.

The reason it is flat rather than a percentage is the one I would defend hardest. A percentage fee means we earn more when you charge more, which puts us on the wrong side of your pricing decisions. At 50p flat, if you raise your rates, all of that is yours. Our incentive is for you to take lots of payments, not expensive ones.

Refunds

If you refund a patient, the platform fee comes back too, proportionally. Refund half a £50 payment and roughly half the 50p returns with it.

Stripe's own processing fee generally does not come back on a refund. That is Stripe's policy rather than ours, and it is worth knowing before you refund a large payment as a gesture of goodwill: the transaction has already cost you the processing fee whether or not you keep the money.

What is not metered

This is the part that matters more than the 50p, and it is unusual enough to spell out.

Call handling is included. Your practice phone number, every inbound call, the recording, the transcription and the AI summary: all of it is in the £29. There is no per-minute charge, no bundle of minutes, no overage bill if you have a busy month. We carry that cost.

Patient messaging is included. WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, however many conversations.

There is no cap on anything else. No patient limit, no appointment limit, no storage quota, no per-user surcharge for anything except an additional practitioner, which is another £29.

The reason to be specific: "unlimited with fair use" usually means there is a threshold nobody will tell you until you cross it. There is no such threshold here. Call cost is the one that could genuinely hurt us if a practice were extraordinarily busy, and we decided to carry it rather than build a metering system that would make you think twice about publishing your own phone number.

VAT

Movari is not VAT-registered, so £29 is the full price with nothing to add. If that changes (and at some point it will, because registration is mandatory above a turnover threshold), we will say so plainly rather than quietly editing the pricing page.

Your own VAT position on patient fees is a separate question and depends on your services; most physiotherapy treatment by a registered practitioner is exempt, but that is a question for your accountant, not for us.

The comparison worth making

The 50p is easy to find fault with in isolation. The useful comparison is not against zero, it is against what you would otherwise be paying.

A physio running the same practice on a typical stack (practice management software on a mid tier, a separate exercise-prescription subscription, and a call-answering service) is generally somewhere north of £100 a month before a single card payment is processed, and still paying Stripe or an equivalent on top.

We would rather show you the 50p than hide it and let you discover it in a statement. If you would rather not pay it at all, you can take payments entirely outside Movari and simply record them against the appointment. Nothing in the product forces the card through us.