She Cried: How We Saved a Therapist 7% on Every Dollar

A therapist came to us last month. She wasn't looking for a website redesign. She was looking for a way to stop bleeding money.

Eight percent. That's what she was paying on every single patient transaction. Her payment processor—one of those "easy setup" solutions marketed to small businesses—was taking 8 cents of every dollar she earned.

On a $150 therapy session, that's $12. Gone. On every. Single. Appointment.

For a solo practitioner seeing 20-25 clients a week, that adds up to $600-750/month disappearing into processing fees alone.

We rebuilt her entire system. New payment processing. New website. Calendar integration. AI tools for patient scheduling and payments.

Her cost for the website? $0.

When we showed her the new dashboard—when she saw that her processing fees had dropped from 8% to 1%—she started crying.

Not sad tears. Relief tears. "I didn't know this was possible" tears.

The Math That Made Her Cry

Let's say she does $100,000/year in patient revenue. Pretty typical for a solo therapist.

At 8% processing fees, she was losing $8,000/year to her payment processor.

At 1% processing fees, she loses $1,000/year.

That's $7,000 back in her pocket. Every year. For doing absolutely nothing different—except switching to a system that isn't designed to gouge her.

Over 10 years? That's $70,000. The price of a year's salary for an employee. Or a down payment on a house. Or retirement savings she thought she couldn't afford.

But It Wasn't Just the Fees

The payment processor was just the most egregious problem. Her entire tech stack was a mess:

Six different logins. Six different bills. None of them talking to each other. And she still had to manually copy patient info between systems.

This is what we call SaaS hell. And almost every small business owner we meet is living in it.

What She Got Instead

Her website cost her $0 because we're not in the business of charging small business owners for websites. We make our money by being the payment processor—at rates that are actually fair.

When you're only taking 1% instead of 8%, you can afford to give away the website. Everyone wins.

This Isn't Unique to Therapists

We see the same pattern everywhere:

• Contractors paying 2.9% + fees on every invoice
• Salons using Square at 2.6% + $0.10 per swipe
• Consultants losing 3%+ on every Stripe payment
• Restaurants giving up 3-4% to DoorDash and payment processors

Add in the disconnected SaaS tools—the scheduling app, the email tool, the CRM, the website builder—and small businesses are bleeding $500-1,500/month without even realizing it.

That's $6,000-18,000/year. Enough to hire a part-time employee. Enough to fund marketing that actually grows the business. Enough to take a real vacation.

Instead, it's going to a dozen different software companies who are all optimizing for one thing: extracting maximum revenue from small business owners who don't know there's a better way.

The Better Way

We built GullStack because we were tired of watching this happen.

The business model is simple: we consolidate everything into one system, we process payments at fair rates, and we give you the website and tools for free. We make money when you make money—but we don't gouge you in the process.

Less SaaS. Lower fees. More money in your pocket.

That's it. That's the whole pitch.

And when we show business owners the math—when they see how much they've been losing—sometimes they cry.

We think that's a good sign.

See the website: agilecounseling.com