Blog

Practical guides on payment fees, gateways, and ecommerce profitability.

• StopByte is now a payments & ecommerce toolkit

  StopByte has pivoted from a developer forum to free payments and ecommerce calculators plus practical guides on processing fees and profitability.

  August 2, 2026

• Markup vs Margin: The Difference, the Formulas, and a Calculator

  Markup is profit over cost; margin is profit over price. Confusing them silently under-prices your products — here are the formulas, a conversion table, and a live calculator.

  August 2, 2026

• NMI Payment Gateway: What It Is, Who It's For, and How Pricing Works (2026)

  A no-nonsense guide to the NMI payment gateway — how the white-label gateway model works, Customer Vault tokenization, multi-MID support, pricing through resellers, and when to choose it.

  August 2, 2026

• 7 Stripe Alternatives That Can Beat 2.9% + 30¢ (2026)

  The best Stripe alternatives by use case — PayPal Braintree, Square, Adyen, Authorize.net, NMI, Helcim — with verified rates, and when payment orchestration beats switching processors.

  August 2, 2026

• Stripe Fees Explained: Every Rate, Surcharge, and Hidden Cost (2026)

  A complete breakdown of what Stripe actually charges in the US — card rates, international surcharges, ACH, disputes, payouts — with worked examples and ways to lower your effective rate.

  August 2, 2026

• What Is Payment Orchestration? A Plain-English Guide (2026)

  Payment orchestration explained without vendor fluff: smart routing, failover, multi-MID setups, when it pays for itself, and when it is overkill.

  August 2, 2026