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The Back Office Billing Fee

SpartanYard's entire business model is one line item: a flat $4.95 “Back Office Billing Fee” added to each invoice. By default it's paid by your customer, not by you. There is no subscription, no per-seat charge, no percentage cut of your service revenue.

What you (the landscaping business) pay us

Zero. No subscription. No setup fee. No per-seat pricing. No percentage of the service price. No fees on payouts. SpartanYard is free to use indefinitely.

The mobile app your crew uses (FieldSpartan) is also free.

What your customer pays

When your customer pays an invoice through SpartanYard, here's what they see:

Every charge is its own line on the invoice. Nothing is hidden in a markup. Your customer can see exactly where each dollar goes — and wherever the Billing Fee appears (the invoice, the customer portal, the payment screen), SpartanYard shows a short plain-language explanation alongside it. Most questions are answered before they're asked.

$4.95 per invoice. Flat.

One fee, every invoice. Flat — not a percentage. The work of processing an invoice is the same whether the customer paid $80 or $800, so the fee is too. Predictable for you, predictable for your customer.

See also: How to talk about the billing fee with your customers.

Two things you can configure

1. Who pays the Billing Fee

Two options, set per business in your SpartanYard settings:

• Customer pays (default) — the $4.95 appears as a line item on the invoice, the customer pays it, you don't see it on your payout.
• Company pays — the fee is hidden from the customer's invoice; the $4.95 is deducted from your payout instead. Available for cases where one-price quoting matters more than line-item transparency (premium service positioning, certain commercial accounts).

Either way, SpartanYard collects the same $4.95. For most operators, the default — customer pays — is the simpler, cheaper path. Absorbing the fee means it comes out of your margin every invoice.

On customer pays, some customers will ask about the line item. We wrote a guide: How to talk about the billing fee with your customers →

2. Card processing pass-through

If you take card payments, you're already paying processing fees — about 2.9% + $0.30 per card transaction, and 0.8% (capped at $5) for ACH bank transfers. Same way every small business taking cards does. By default you absorb these inside your service price (or out of your margin if your price is already set).

SpartanYard lets you optionally pass these through to the customer as a clean line item, so they pay the actual processing cost instead of having it baked invisibly into your rate. Common in B2B / commercial landscaping and increasingly accepted in residential.

To be clear: processing fees always go to Stripe — never to SpartanYard, in either mode. The toggle just decides who pays Stripe: you (absorbed in your service price) or the customer (visible line item on the invoice).

Why we built it this way

SpartanYard is operator-built. Three observations from running landscape routes shaped the model:

• Subscription software penalizes growth. Per-seat fees, tier upgrades, renewal ratchets — the bill literally goes up as you scale. Exactly when you need software costs to scale down with you, not up.
• And it ignores your bad months. Slow week, slow month, slow quarter — the subscription doesn't drop with your revenue. You pay the same whether you collected $10,000 or $100,000. They get paid for you logging in, not for you running a healthy business.
• Per-invoice means we earn when you collect. A slow week for you is a slow week for us. A bad customer who never pays earns us nothing. That puts our incentive directly on building the tools that help you actually collect — autopay, ACH, card-on-file, invoice reminders, portal payments.

Common questions

Why is it called the “Back Office Billing Fee”?

Because that's what it covers, and customers understand it intuitively.

Landscaping has a clear shape from the customer's perspective: there's the crew that shows up and does the work, and there's everything else that has to happen for the work to turn into an invoice — scheduling, records, generating the invoice, processing the payment, support when something breaks. The landscaper isn't running a corporate office; he's running a route. The customer knows that. They don't expect their landscaper to do all the office-side work for free.

“Back Office Billing Fee” puts a name on that. It says exactly what it covers: the office-side work that supports the visit they're paying for. Reasonable to charge for, easy for the customer to read on their bill and understand without needing a separate explanation.

The alternatives — “Platform Fee,” “Software Fee,” “Service Fee” — are vaguer. They sound like things a SaaS company would charge for, not something a landscaping service would. We kept the more specific name on purpose.

What if my customer disputes the Billing Fee?

It's a line item on the invoice — your customer pays it or disputes the whole invoice the same way they would any other charge. In practice this almost never comes up on residential lawn service.

If it does come up often enough to matter, your option is to flip the global setting to “company pays the Billing Fee” — that absorbs the $4.95 on every invoice from then on, not just for the one customer. There's no per-customer override.

What about voids, refunds, partial payments, or cash?

Voided invoices. No charge. If the invoice never collects, we don't get paid either.

Refunds. If you refund a paid invoice, the $4.95 gets refunded too. We lose money the same way you do. That's the alignment the rest of the model talks about — operational, not just rhetorical.

Partial payments. Not supported. SpartanYard requires full collection or voiding the invoice; we don't run partial-payment flows.

Cash or check on the truck. Your business. If a customer hands you cash or a check directly and you don't record the payment through SpartanYard, no $4.95 hits — you're not using the system for that transaction. Charge the customer a back-office fee on your own or don't; pocket it or pass it on. We don't see it.

What about taxes on the Billing Fee?

Stripe Tax handles this automatically based on your business's tax registrations and the customer's address — including whether the Billing Fee itself gets taxed. In most states, services like residential lawn maintenance aren't sales-taxable, so neither is the Billing Fee. In states that tax services more broadly (Hawaii, New Mexico, South Dakota, West Virginia), it's typically included. Any tax collected goes to the state, not to us.

Do I have to pay for my crew?

No. No per-tech licensing, no seat fees, no plan tier you outgrow as you hire. 1 crew member or 50, no extra charge. How many employees you have is none of our business.

Landscapers run on FieldSpartan, which is free for them too — day's route, photos, application records, all synced back to you. No subscription, no in-app purchases.

The $4.95 per invoice is the only number that scales.

How can you afford this?

We're betting that enough landscapers pay enough invoices through SpartanYard that $4.95 × N adds up to a real business. A lawn route doing $50K/month in invoices generates a few hundred invoices, which is a few hundred Billing Fees, which scales with you — but it scales only with invoices that actually get collected. That's the point. We grow when you grow. We don't when you don't.

Is the total cost higher than what I'd pay in a subscription?

In total dollar terms, sometimes yes, what flows through SpartanYard can be more than what a subscription competitor would bill you. The difference is alignment.

We don't bill the operator. We charge the customer who's receiving service through our system — autopay, invoice transparency, customer portal, the back-office work that lands a clean bill in their inbox. They're paying for a better service experience; you get the tools to deliver it without a monthly bill against your margin.

No subscription that runs whether your month was good or bad. No per-seat penalty when you hire your fifth crew member. No renewal-cycle ratchet. We make money the same week you do, on the same transaction. Or we don't make money at all.

Closed for the season? Your SpartanYard bill closes with you. No off-season subscription for software you're not using — when you're not invoicing, we're not earning. Lawn care's seasonality is the obvious example: winter months light, spring ramp, summer peak.

Am I locked in?

No. Your customer list, visit history, and invoices export to CSV / Excel from inside the app any time. Stripe payouts go directly to your bank — SpartanYard never sits between you and your money. No contract, no exit fee. You stay because the tools work, not because leaving is hard.

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Still have questions?

Email support@spartanyard.com and we'll work it through. We don't hide the model — every honest question gets a plain answer.

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