> surprised if the interchange fees don't net out negative for the biller
That's worth investigating!
Now in a fictional, adversarial way, you can think of a bot exploiting this discrepancy to bankrupt a competitor: create dozens of fake accounts, consume just shy of $0.01 of resources, and have the platform pays 30x more in payment fees (public Stripe price is 30¢/transaction).
To incur a net loss of $1,000,000, you’ll have to find an antagonist ready to create 3,448,276 accounts (1_000_000 / (0.30 - 0.01)), each with their own identity and mean of payment, for a total of $34,482.76.
Fortunately this is highly impractical and will be caught real fast by your internal anti-abuse systems (you have those in place right?).
Small players would be impacted by a 100k$ net loss...and you could even spread it out over several months to be less likely to be caught by anti-abuse systems...
My most recent Rackspace bill was $0.05. I don't even remember what I'm using it for any more, but it's not worth it to check out.
My last Pulumi bill was $0.86.