PayLeafTwelve months of billing, twenty days of trade
Markets are seasonal and weather-dependent. A subscription that renews every month regardless is a real cost applied to weekends you never got to trade.
Market & craft fair payments
Sell twenty weekends a year. Pay for twenty weekends.
If your season is farmers' markets, craft fairs and the odd pop-up, a monthly terminal contract is the wrong shape for your business. PayLeaf has no fixed cost at all: print a QR code, take cards at the table, and pay a percentage only on the sales you actually make.
No monthly costNo hardwareCards at the table
Sound familiar?
Weekend selling does not fit a monthly contract.
Losing sales to cash-only
Plenty of people at a market carry no cash at all. Being cash-only is not a neutral choice — it is a quiet ceiling on what your table can take in a day.
Hardware to store all winter
A reader you have to keep charged, updated and findable in March is one more thing to lose. A printed code costs nothing to store and cannot go flat.
How PayLeaf fits a stall
A card in a stand, and a phone in your apron.
Print your PayLeaf QR code and stand it on the table beside the price list. A customer decides on two jars and a card of soap, you tell them the total, and they scan the code and pay on their own phone by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. There is no terminal to share, so two customers can be paying while you are wrapping for a third.
For a stall that mostly sells fixed-price items, you can build the exact amount in the app and show that instead — the customer scans a code for that specific total, so there is no typing and no wrong figure. Either way the payment is processed by Stripe on a secure page, and the money is paid out to your own Canadian bank account.
Every sale lands in your history with a time on it, which turns the end of a market day into reading a number rather than reconstructing it. If you trade several markets in a weekend, each day's takings are already separated for you.
Nothing about this costs you anything on a weekend you do not trade. That is the part that matters for a seasonal stall, and it is why the math below works out the way it does. If you also run a truck or a food stall, the food truck setup is the same idea at a service window.
A table sale with no terminal involved — and no monthly fee behind it.
The low-volume math
Fixed monthly costs punish small sellers.
This is the whole argument for a percentage-only fee. Take a $360.00 market day — 6 sales at $60.00 each — and compare what each pricing model takes out of it.
$14.04
PayLeaf fees on that market day
0.5% to PayLeaf plus Stripe's standard processing on each of the 6 sales. You keep $345.96.
$50.00
A terminal rental at, say, $50.00 a month
Charged whether you trade or not, and still charged on top of that provider's own per-transaction processing.
$0.00
What PayLeaf costs in a month you do not sell
No subscription, no minimum, no contract. A rained-out season costs you nothing to stay ready for.
The rental figure is an example, not a quote — providers price differently and you should check your own agreement. The point is the shape: a fixed monthly charge is indifferent to whether you sold anything, and a percentage is not. Card figures use Stripe's standard published rate for a domestic Canadian card; see the pricing page for the exact breakdown.
FAQ
Straight answers.
Yes. There is no subscription, no minimum, no hardware rental and no contract. In a month where you trade nothing, PayLeaf costs you nothing. The only charge is 0.5% to PayLeaf plus standard Stripe processing on each sale you actually take.
Stripe's processing includes a fixed 30 cents per transaction, so the percentage you pay overall is higher on very small tickets. On a $60 sale the total fee is $2.34; on a $10 sale it is 64 cents. Bundling a customer's items into one payment rather than several keeps that fixed portion down.
No. You need a phone with the app and a printed QR code on your table. There is nothing to charge, nothing to update over the winter, and nothing to replace when it is lost.
The customer pays on their own phone over their own data connection, so you are not dependent on venue wifi. You need enough signal on your phone to see payments arrive; if it is patchy at your stall, the payments still land and appear once you have service again.
Of course — PayLeaf is only there for the customers who want to pay by card. Most sellers run both, and the app's history covers the card side so you only have to count the float.
Card payments are paid out by Stripe to your own Canadian bank account in roughly two business days. PayLeaf never holds your money — Stripe processes the payment and pays you directly.
More questions? The full FAQ covers fees, payouts, refunds and GST in detail.