Intuit Launches GoPayment in Canada, But is it a Scam?

Intuit has brought its two-year-old GoPayment reader to Canada, creating some competition for locals like PayFirma. Launched in 2009 in the U.S., GoPayment is an app and credit card reader that enables small businesses to charge consumer credit cards via smartphones in a secure manner.

But there is some debate about whether GoPayment is as good (read: cost-effective) as industry leading Square or Canadian PayFirma. When TechCrunch stated that Intuit's service "has no monthly, transaction or cancellation fees, and offers a 2.7 percent rate for swiped transactions," Fee Fighters immediately countered the notion, stating that "the new pricing is a scam."

For a very small portion of transactions you get a pretty good rate under the new pricing (if you pay the $13/month for the upgraded plan), but because they use tiered pricing you’ll actually get the non-qualified rate (3.7%) most of the time. Our customers were seeing the non-qualified rate on average on 70% of transactions. […] Ultimately the vast majority of your transactions/cards will fall under that pricing tier and you’ll pay 3.7% on them. 

FF affirms that tiered pricing "is NOT the way to go because it’s confusing and you don’t know what you’ll be paying," and notes that Intuit "hides their fees in the pricing schedule."

UPDATE: A rep for Intuit has informed us that Fee Fighters' criticisms of GoPayment are inaccurate, stating that "3.7% is the cost of manually entering credit card information into the device [and] 2.7% is the rate the rest of the time":

The [GoPayment] reader is completely free, there are no start-up fees, nor is there any contract. There is no tiered pricing system —this is a falsehood.