Bring Your Own Accounts: How BloomCore Saves You Money

Most software platforms that handle payments and communications work the same way: they pick a payment processor, negotiate a deal, bake that processor into their product, and charge you a markup on every transaction. You never see the underlying rate. You just pay whatever they decide to charge.

BloomCore works differently. We call our approach BYOK — Bring Your Own Keys. Instead of forcing you into our payment processor or our email service at our markup, you connect your own accounts. Your Stripe. Your email API key. Your mapping service. You keep the negotiated rates you've earned, and we make those services work seamlessly inside BloomCore.

Here's why that matters, and how it actually works.

The Problem with Bundled Payment Processing

When a POS platform bundles payment processing, they're typically earning somewhere between 0.3% and 1% on top of the base processor rate — on every single transaction you run. This is sometimes disclosed, sometimes not.

On $20,000 in monthly card volume, a 0.5% platform markup costs you $100/month you didn't need to spend. A 1% markup costs $200/month. Annualized, that's $1,200 to $2,400 in fees that benefit the platform, not your shop.

The bundled model also locks you in. If the platform decides to raise their markup — or switches to a processor with worse chargeback policies — you have no recourse. You accepted whatever they chose when you signed up.

How BYOK Works in BloomCore

When you onboard with BloomCore, you'll go through a brief setup process to connect your own accounts for each key service:

Payments via Stripe: Stripe offers direct merchant accounts with transparent, publicly posted rates. You create your own Stripe account (or connect an existing one), and BloomCore integrates with it directly. Every dollar flows from your customer's card through Stripe to your bank account. BloomCore never touches the money. You pay Stripe's standard processing fees. We charge nothing on top.

Email and notification delivery: For order confirmations, delivery notifications, and marketing emails, BloomCore connects to your email API account. We support the major providers. You create the account, we integrate it, and your sending volume comes out of your own plan — not a shared pool that affects deliverability.

Mapping and routing: Delivery route optimization uses a mapping API. With BYOK, that API key is yours. You control the usage, you see the billing, and you're not at risk of service interruption if BloomCore ever changes providers.

The Real Savings

Let's be concrete about what this means for a shop doing $15,000/month in card transactions.

A platform charging a 0.8% processing markup takes $120/month from that volume before you see it. Over a year, that's $1,440 in silent fees. Over three years, $4,320.

With BYOK, you pay Stripe's published rate directly. There's no markup. The $1,440 per year stays in your account.

For shops with higher volume, the math is even more favorable. A shop processing $40,000/month in cards would save $3,840 per year at the same 0.8% markup rate — nearly $12,000 over three years.

You Own Your Data and Your Relationships

There's a less obvious benefit to BYOK that matters as much as the cost savings: you own the relationships.

When your payment processor is your own Stripe account, your transaction history, your customer card data (tokenized securely by Stripe), and your payout history all belong to you. If you ever switch POS systems, you take your Stripe account with you. Your history is intact. Your saved payment methods continue to work.

The same applies to your email sending account. Your domain reputation, your unsubscribe lists, your deliverability history — they're yours, not the platform's.

What BYOK Requires from You

Setting up BYOK takes about 15–20 minutes during onboarding. You'll need to:

Create a Stripe account (or connect an existing one) and complete their identity verification
Create an email API account and verify your sending domain
Generate an API key for the mapping service

BloomCore's onboarding walks you through each step with direct links and screenshots. Most florists complete the full BYOK setup in a single onboarding session.

There is no technical expertise required. If you can set up a business email account, you can complete BYOK setup.

The Philosophy Behind It

We built BYOK because we believe your shop's data and financial relationships should belong to you, not to us. We're a software platform. Our job is to make your shop run better, not to insert ourselves as a financial intermediary taking a cut of every transaction.

Flat monthly fee. No transaction markups. Your accounts, your data, your relationships. That's the model we think florists deserve.