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HL Hunt Pay Puts Its Fees Next to Stripe's and Square's in a Side-by-Side Table. Here's What It Leaves Out.
HL Hunt's payments page runs its own comparison chart against Stripe and Square on rate, settlement speed and account-shutdown policy — and while the line items are drawn straight from published pricing, a self-authored scorecard is a different thing than an independent one.
SPONSORED CONTENT — HL Hunt Pay's product page includes a direct side-by-side comparison table pitting itself against Stripe and Square on eight line items: starting transaction rate, monthly fees, instant-settlement costs, AI-powered routing, fraud detection, multi-currency handling, account-shutdown policy and support access. The table is labeled as drawing on "publicly available data, 2026," and lands on HL Hunt's three-tier pricing structure — a $9.99-to-$199.99-style ladder isn't used here; instead payments pricing runs 2.4% plus 30 cents on the Starter plan, 1.9% plus 20 cents on the Business plan, and custom volume pricing for Enterprise.
The rate comparison itself is straightforward to check: HL Hunt lists Stripe's standard online rate as 2.9% plus 30 cents and Square's as 2.6% plus 10 cents, both of which are consistent with those companies' generally published pricing for standard card-not-present transactions, though both Stripe and Square offer volume discounts and alternate plans that a single-row comparison doesn't capture. Where the table gets more interpretive is on rows like "account shutdowns," where HL Hunt labels its own policy "Never — Partnership model" against "Common — Automated terminations" for Stripe and "Common — Frozen funds reported" for Square. Those characterizations point to real, widely discussed complaints from merchants about both incumbents freezing funds or terminating accounts with limited explanation, but "never" is a claim about HL Hunt's own future conduct that a comparison table can't substantiate on its own.
Beyond the comparison table, the same page details three checkout implementations — a fully hosted checkout page requiring no code, an embedded checkout component for existing websites, and a custom API-and-SDK path for developers building bespoke flows — plus native support for one-time payments, subscriptions, usage-based billing and buy-now-pay-later, all positioned as replacing the need for separate third-party billing tools.
None of this changes the basic caveat that applies to every self-published comparison chart in the payments industry: the rows, categories and framing were chosen by the company being compared favorably, and a merchant evaluating the claims should check current published pricing and terms directly with Stripe and Square rather than relying on a competitor's summary of them.