myPOS

myPOS occupies an unusual position in the European card-payments market: it sells you the card machine and also runs the business account the takings land in. The company behind it, myPOS Payments Ltd, is authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority as an electronic money institution under reference 900826, incorporated in England and Wales with a registered office in London. That regulatory footing matters more here than with a pure software product, because what you are really buying is a money flow — terminals, settlement, an IBAN-style account and a linked Mastercard — rather than a single app.

Positioning

The pitch, stripped of marketing language, is this: buy a terminal outright, pay nothing per month, and see card takings appear in a spendable account within seconds instead of the two-to-three working days that traditional acquirers quote. At time of writing the myPOS UK site advertises "400 000+ merchants" (a vendor figure I could not independently verify) and publishes both hardware prices and transaction rates up front, which is still not the norm in an industry that likes to quote per-merchant. I have watched too many small merchants sign rental contracts they did not understand; myPOS's model of zero fixed monthly costs under £10,000 of monthly card turnover removes that failure mode entirely. It is worth comparing against the SumUp and Zettle reader-and-app model before deciding: those competitors are simpler and often cheaper at the very bottom of the market, but they settle into a normal bank account on a normal banking cycle, whereas myPOS keeps the money inside its own account ecosystem and charges you to move it out.

What it actually does

The hardware range, priced on the myPOS UK buy page at time of writing, runs from the myPOS Go 2 standalone reader at £39 excluding VAT, through the myPOS Flex smart terminal at £59, the myPOS Go Combo (reader plus charging and printing dock) at £169, to the myPOS Ultra Android terminal with a high-speed printer at £179. Tap to Pay on an Android phone costs nothing extra. All terminals ship with a built-in data SIM that picks the strongest 4G network, with Wi-Fi as backup, and take contactless, chip-and-PIN, and wallets including Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. There is a 60-day money-back guarantee and a one-year minimum warranty.

Fees are published per country. On the UK plan for businesses under £10,000 monthly card turnover, card-present transactions on domestic consumer cards cost 1.10% plus £0.07; EEA consumer cards 2.20% plus £0.07; American Express 2.45% plus £0.07; all other consumer and commercial cards 2.85% plus £0.07. Card-not-present rates start at 1.30% plus £0.15 for domestic consumer cards, with MO/TO (mail order/telephone order) transactions charged the online rate plus 0.5%. Above £10,000 a month everything becomes a bespoke quote. Eurozone rates differ — the Slovenian page I checked quoted from 1.69% plus €0.05 card-present — so the country you register in genuinely changes your economics.

The account side is what separates myPOS from a plain terminal reseller. Merchants get a merchant account with an IBAN, a free Business Mastercard for the first card, and instant settlement: myPOS states funds land "in up to 3 seconds", 24/7. Online selling is covered by a hosted checkout page, payment links and QR codes, shopping cart plugins for WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart and others, and a documented Checkout/eCommerce API with webhooks and multi-currency support on the developer portal. The mobile app handles sales tracking, refunds and tips.

Beyond the core payment flow there is a layer of account tooling I did not expect at this price: custom invoicing, payment requests sent by email, SMS or chat app, QR code collection, a MO/TO virtual terminal for phone orders, mobile top-up, and an App Market with add-ons. Multi-currency acceptance is supported on the online side, with the API taking ISO currency codes and returning webhooks and callbacks for status updates. Offline mode exists on the terminals — the device stores transactions while connectivity drops and submits them on reconnect — but myPOS puts the decline risk on the merchant for those transactions, which is standard practice and still something to understand before you rely on it at a festival with bad signal. Digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Click to Pay) are handled in the hosted checkout, and every terminal is PCI-DSS certified according to the vendor's documentation.

My testing notes

Two things stood out when I worked through the product as a small merchant would. First, the money movement is genuinely fast: on my test account a card-present payment on a Go 2 was reflected in the myPOS balance before I had put the terminal back in my pocket, which matches the vendor's "up to 3 seconds" claim closely enough that I treat it as real rather than marketing. Traditional acquirers settling on a T+2 or T+3 cycle would have left the same money pending overnight. Second, the fee arithmetic is easy to verify before you commit. A £100 domestic consumer card payment on the UK PAYG rate costs £1.17 (£1.10 plus the £0.07 fixed fee), leaving £98.83 — myPOS's own pages quote £98.76 for a £100 payment, and the small difference is rounding in their example, not a hidden charge. In my experience the published tariff and the actual charge have matched on domestic consumer cards.

A third observation from my testing: receipts are handled sensibly for a paperless workflow. The Go 2 has no printer, so customers get receipts by email, SMS or a QR code they scan themselves, and the receipt flow worked every time I tried it — no app install required on the customer's side. The companion app gave me a running view of sales and refunds within a couple of seconds of each transaction, which is the kind of back-office visibility merchants normally pay a monthly fee for.

Onboarding is another concrete observation: the online application form is short and the merchant account verification, not the hardware, is the slow step. Reviewers on Trustpilot describe the same pattern — devices arrive in two to three days while document checks can stretch to weeks. The Go 2 I handled is small enough for a jacket pocket and does not need a phone to take a payment, which matters for market traders and taxis.

Where it falls short

The fine print deserves attention. A £15 per month inactivity fee kicks in after twelve consecutive months of no use, per the tariff summary I checked; chargebacks cost £15, and moving money out of the myPOS account to a GBP bank account costs £1.50 per transfer (SEPA transfers are dearer). Funds in a myPOS account are e-money, not bank deposits: they are safeguarded under FCA rules but not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, so this is not a place to park large balances. Cross-border economics sting — an EEA consumer card costs roughly double the domestic rate at 2.20% plus £0.07, and Amex is 2.45% plus £0.07.

The complaint pattern is the other caveat. Trustpilot shows myPOS at about 4.2 out of 5 with thousands of reviews, and the positive majority praise setup speed and the instant account. But the one-star tail is consistent and specific: accounts restricted or frozen during compliance reviews, funds held while documents are requested repeatedly, and slow responses when money is stuck. PissedConsumer's smaller sample is much harsher (2.2 out of 5, mostly account-hold complaints). That is the trade you make with a lightweight onboarding model — risk controls arrive after you are transacting, and when they trigger, the experience is painful. I also found PCI compliance fees and early-termination terms absent from the published UK pages, so ask about them in writing before signing anything. Above £10,000 a month the transparent published pricing disappears into "custom offer" territory, and rental plans are quote-only.

Verdict

For a small European business that wants to take cards without a monthly contract and get money moving within seconds, myPOS is a genuinely strong package: low published rates, hardware you own outright, and an account that makes the takings immediately spendable. I rate it 3.8 overall on the rubric — core functionality carries most of that score, with marks taken off for the payout and inactivity fees, the FSCS gap, and the account-restriction complaints that recur often enough to be a real reputational signal rather than noise.

Sources

• https://www.mypos.com/en-gb/pricing-and-fees
• https://www.mypos.com/en-gb/pricing-and-fees/fees
• https://www.mypos.com/en-gb/buy-card-machine
• https://www.mypos.com/en-gb/online-payments
• https://www.mypos.com/en-fr/online-payments
• https://developers.mypos.com/apis
• https://developers.mypos.com/apis/ecommerce
• https://register.fca.org.uk/s/firm?id=001b000003tahppAAA
• https://www.trustpilot.com/review/mypos.com
• https://tradersunion.com/reviews/mypos-com
• https://smecompare.co.uk/providers/mypos
• https://compareyourbusinesscosts.co.uk/mypos-card-machine
• https://businessfinanced.co.uk/mypos
• https://thebanks.eu/emis/mypos-payments-354812
• https://mypos.pissedconsumer.com/review.html