I helped create this calculator... and it's sad to see someone say that it is "lying". The reality is that this is by far the most honest, transparent way to compare the all-in costs of Square vs. using a wireless terminal with a merchant account. The costs are all very carefully laid out below, and the $ amounts are real.
Say what you want about our choice of the bar-graph... that's fair criticism. It wasn't intended to be an accurate graph, just something cool to look at.
What we really care about at TransFS is giving people unbiased, accurate information about their options. Square is a great deal for many merchants... which is why we suggest them to our customers and link to their site.
I don't buy this argument. I have no trouble reading fresh, interesting content without feeling the need to jump away on an embedded link.
The reason that I click a link is that I've lost interest, or have found new interest, in something that the author is referring to. Why is this a bad thing?
Context-switching on the web is cheap enough that I shouldn't have to scroll to the end of an article to find a link to something more interesting than what I'm reading right now.
Meanwhile, the links at the end of this article are not helpful. They have no context, and require me to think back through the article to decide if I want to read them.
Great description of what life is like as a "ground floor engineer". It's true, you work constantly and have to be a generalist. In exchange, you get an incredibly rewarding job where you get to watch the company grow up around you.
@brm: TransFS.com is my startup, and I seriously considered posting a response to this thread a couple of hours ago... but I didn't want to spam HN with self-promotion.
Indeed we are new, having launched in beta about 6 months ago. However, we have a number of aggressive processing bidders on our site... and I honestly believe that our marketplace offers some of the best pricing out there, especially for new merchants. We are always improving the product, and have plenty of work to do, but our customers have been very happy overall with the comparison shopping experience that we offer.
As my co-founder put it in an email to one of our potential customers today: "TransFS is the second startup for both the cofounders of our business (Sean and Josh) and we are radically passionate about helping business owners get a fair shake and reduce the way-too-high profits of the credit card processors."
@Jerecoh: I use Joyent too... and have been very pleased with it. But, I have to admit that we didn't spend a lot of time evaluating all of the other cloud options out there. Why did you choose Joyent?
I think he already told us: "If Mosso gave OpenSolaris as an option, I would switch to it."
I'm surprised to see it, since the majority of folks prefer Linux by some margin (certainly the userland is better on Linux). But Solaris has some killer features in the cloud space, and Joyent are doing a great job taking advantage of them. Solaris Zones are quite a bit more efficient than Xen, and quite a bit more stable than OpenVZ/Virtuozzo and vservers (which use roughly the same model as Solaris Zones).
Say what you want about our choice of the bar-graph... that's fair criticism. It wasn't intended to be an accurate graph, just something cool to look at.
What we really care about at TransFS is giving people unbiased, accurate information about their options. Square is a great deal for many merchants... which is why we suggest them to our customers and link to their site.