Run the arithmetic a percentage-of-recovery tool hopes you will not. Say a store fails $40,000 of payments in a year — unremarkable for a mid-size subscription business — and a competent tool recovers a third of it. At a typical percentage take, the invoice for that recovery lands in the thousands, every year, growing in lockstep with the business it protects. The tool has quietly become one of the largest vendors in the stack, paid like a partner, contracted like a utility.
Now price the alternative honestly: a flat fee does not care whether recovery is $1,000 or $100,000. The tool's revenue is capped; the merchant's upside is not. That asymmetry is why Swipe Again charges $179 flat and publishes the reasoning on its flat-fee page — a percentage model pays the vendor most when the merchant bleeds most, and any pricing scheme that profits from the size of your problem will eventually, subtly, stop minding the problem.
Vendors prefer percentages for a legitimate reason: it de-risks their sale. But de-risking the vendor means re-risking the merchant, at scale, forever. When a category's pricing all points one way, the flat fee is not a discount. It is a different theory of whose side the tool is on — stated, as it should be, in numbers.
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