Pricing and pricing only. The flat fee is one of the biggest killers. $0.30/per makes it near impossible to offer certain features and 2.9% is decently high (and that's before you turn on any other services). Instead I'm able to get ~2% (varies by card, some are higher, some are lower, but I'm just paying the interchange fee + a small percent to the processor) and zero flat fee on the transaction.
EDIT: Just to expand on what I'm doing, it's software for food festivals where people pre-load their accounts with money and then spend it at the vendors. It means we only need in-person CC terminals in a few places and vendors can use their smart phones to charge someone's account. It also means all transactions go though our software and the festival can take it's cut. Without this vendors would provide.... creative records of how much they sold (festival takes X% so if the vendor can hide some sales it can keep 100% of those sales). Because of this there isn't a ton of room for more percentages/flat-fees to be taken out. If someone wants to buy something and needs 1 more dollar in their account then we give up over 30% to Stripe. Even on a $5 charge we give up close to 9%. If I can get rid of the flat fee we could do a number of things like just linking a card and charging it on the fly with every purchase instead of first loading money onto your account. I'd be killed with fees if I did that with Stripe since we are talking about $2/3/5 items (it's a food festival, the portions/prices are small so you can try a bunch of things). Also things like "auto-reload if your account dips below $X", with Stripe I'd need to make the reload amount minimum decently high to avoid taking a bath in fees.
Haha, when I first saw "Bolt" I thought "Hey that's a CardConnect thing!" because I've integrated with it before and will be using Card Connect's Bolt again for this project. I scoured the Card Connect website to make sure it wasn't some kind of partnership and it's not the same thing (not saying you said it was or thought it was, I thought it might be at first).
I can say that Bolt is pretty easy to work with from my experience. I have a wired Bolt reader (IPP320) sitting next to me as I type this (I've worked with it through my employer) and a wireless/BT VP3300 in my bag (which is what I'm going to use for my food festival stuff).
Nothing beats Stripe's docs and the community around it (both in info/SO-answers and in things like SDKs) but CardConnect and Bolt are easy enough. That said I wish their onboarding was streamlined. I had to be in 4-5 meetings with them before I got credentials to start coding and I'll have to be in a few more before I go live. I think you can use their UAT or similar without an account but I wanted to make sure they'd accept me before I started working on it. Super nice people, it just doesn't compare to a few clicks with Stripe and boom, you are off to the races.
EDIT: Just to expand on what I'm doing, it's software for food festivals where people pre-load their accounts with money and then spend it at the vendors. It means we only need in-person CC terminals in a few places and vendors can use their smart phones to charge someone's account. It also means all transactions go though our software and the festival can take it's cut. Without this vendors would provide.... creative records of how much they sold (festival takes X% so if the vendor can hide some sales it can keep 100% of those sales). Because of this there isn't a ton of room for more percentages/flat-fees to be taken out. If someone wants to buy something and needs 1 more dollar in their account then we give up over 30% to Stripe. Even on a $5 charge we give up close to 9%. If I can get rid of the flat fee we could do a number of things like just linking a card and charging it on the fly with every purchase instead of first loading money onto your account. I'd be killed with fees if I did that with Stripe since we are talking about $2/3/5 items (it's a food festival, the portions/prices are small so you can try a bunch of things). Also things like "auto-reload if your account dips below $X", with Stripe I'd need to make the reload amount minimum decently high to avoid taking a bath in fees.