According to payments executive Ivaylo Bozoukov, the card terminal in Costa Rica is turning into something merchants download rather than something they rent. ...

According to payments executive Ivaylo Bozoukov, the card terminal in Costa Rica is turning into something merchants download rather than something they rent. 

The price gap goes some way to explaining the situation. The Banco Central de Costa Rica’s December 2025 technical study on card fees found that in 2024, the most common monthly fee charged to merchants for software that turns an ordinary phone into a card terminal was ₡515 (Costa Rican colones), against ₡12,500 for a traditional terminal. 

“For years, accepting cards meant renting a piece of hardware and finding room for it in the shop,” he says. “Once the terminal becomes an app, the starting cost of taking an electronic payment falls to a level almost any trader can carry.” 

The central bank’s preliminary figures for 2025 show the scale of Costa Rica’s card acceptance network. During the year, 149,790 affiliated merchants had 211,676 devices for point-of-sale transactions between them. 

Within that total, around 16,000 were mobile card readers, small physical units that connect to a mobile phone. Around 11,000 were applications installed directly on a phone, which allow it to process card-present payments without any additional hardware. 

Those devices were busy. Some 1.4 billion transactions were processed in 2025, 23.1% more than a year earlier, and each device received an average of 18.2 payments a day.

The newer categories matter because of what they remove. A mobile reader still relies on a separate piece of equipment. A phone-based application relies on nothing the merchant does not already own.

The central bank’s fee study points in the same direction. By the end of 2024, merchants that had contracted mobile readers accounted for 3.3% of affiliated merchants, while those using phone-based terminal technology accounted for 6.7%. More merchants, in other words, had already signed up for the software option than for the add-on reader. 

The difference shows up most clearly in the monthly bill. At ₡515 a month for the software option, against ₡12,500 for a conventional terminal, the fixed cost of being able to accept a card shrinks dramatically.

For a large retailer, that gap may be marginal. For a street food seller, a home-based business or a tradesperson working from a van, it can decide whether accepting cards makes sense at all. 

Ivaylo Bozoukov describes the shift as a change in who the acceptance market is built for. “A traditional terminal assumes a fixed location, steady volumes and a business that can absorb a monthly rental,” he points out. “An app on a phone suits the merchant who moves around, trades part-time or is only just starting out, and those are exactly the businesses still deciding whether to go electronic.” 

Costa Rica’s card market operates within a regulated framework. Under Law No. 9831, the central bank is responsible for regulating the commissions charged for processing card payments, with the stated aims of promoting efficiency and security, and ensuring the lowest possible cost for affiliated merchants. 

Two caps apply to local payments. The acquiring commission, which the merchant pays its provider, has been capped at 1.95% since 19 February 2024. The interchange commission, which that provider pays the card issuer, has been capped at 1.00% since 20 February 2025. The central bank’s 2025 study proposed keeping the monthly ceiling at ₡14,000 per terminal, and recorded that the average cost of acquiring fell from 2.63% in 2020 to 1.89% in 2024. 

Those rules shape what merchants pay on each transaction. The shift to software addresses a different question: what it costs to have the ability to accept a card in the first place. 

That distinction matters most at the smallest end of the market. A monthly fixed cost is paid whether or not a single customer taps a card, which makes it the first hurdle for a business with uncertain sales. Reduce that hurdle to a few hundred colones, and the calculation changes for traders who might previously have stayed with cash. 

“For a very small business, the deciding question is whether accepting cards is worth setting up at all,” Bozoukov argues. “When all it takes is a phone they own anyway, far more of them will say yes.”

As acceptance moves off dedicated hardware and onto phones that traders already carry, the cost of starting to take electronic payments in Costa Rica is falling to something a very small business can absorb. The practical side is just as simple. A merchant using an application has no separate device to collect, charge or store, and getting started means installing software on the same phone that already handles the rest of the business.

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