Cost Observability
- Solo Product Designer
- Juspay Hyperswitch
- 0 → 1 Product
Every payment generates revenue. But not every dollar reaches the merchant.
After building payment infrastructure for enterprise businesses in India for over a decade, Juspay expanded into the US and European markets through Hyperswitch. It exposed us to a very different payments ecosystem, where payment costs were no longer a hidden operational detail but a critical business concern.
Working closely with enterprise merchants in these markets gave us a deeper understanding of how those costs were structured and why making sense of them remained so difficult.
On the surface, payments appear simple. A customer pays, and the merchant gets paid.
In reality, every transaction passes through multiple participants before reaching the merchant, each introducing its own fees and rules. Individually these costs seem small, but at enterprise scale they become one of a merchant's largest variable expenses.
The visibility gap
Merchants knew how much they were paying, but had very little understanding of what changed, why it changed, or where their money was going.
Payment costs look small, typically 1.5-3.5% of payment volume, but at enterprise scale they quickly translate into millions of dollars in avoidable spend.
$5M a year costs about $100K in fees, so a 5 bps rise adds just $2.5K.
$50M a year costs about $1M in fees, so the same rise adds $25K.
$500M a year costs about $10M in fees, so the same rise adds $250K.
Making payment costs observable.
HyperSense is a payment cost observability platform built to help merchants understand where their payment costs come from, why they change, and what actions to take next.
It transforms fragmented payment data spread across processor invoices, settlement reports, and transaction logs into a single investigation experience.
- Domain research
- Researched payment-cost structures, fee models, and pricing mechanics through collaboration with business teams and agencies involved in manual cost analysis.
- Product strategy
- Partnered with the PM to shape the product vision, define target users, and establish the core investigation experience.
- Product design
- Designed the end-to-end experience for enterprise payments, translating complex payment-cost structures into intuitive investigation workflows, information architecture, and data visualisations.
- Product execution
- Led design as the sole product designer on a seven-person cross-functional team, working across product, engineering, and business development from early concepts through merchant pilots.
The industry's most transparent pricing model comes with an invisible tradeoff.
Every card payment carries a cost. How that cost is calculated depends on the merchant's pricing model: Blended or IC++.
Blended pricing applies a fixed rate to every transaction, making costs predictable but often more expensive at scale. IC++ passes through the underlying processing costs for each transaction, creating opportunities to optimise costs.
The same transparency that creates savings also creates complexity.
In IC++ pricing, every transaction is priced independently. Card type, authentication, settlement timing, geography, and data quality all influence the final fee. Each variable can shift a transaction into a different fee tier, making costs harder to track.
Without visibility, enterprise merchants often pay more than they should. The gap between expected and actual payment costs can reach 7–10%.
Payment cost data is fragmented.
Teams piece together invoices, settlement reports, and network documentation to understand what they were actually charged.
Three users. One blind spot. Different stakes.
Payment costs weren’t owned by a single team. Analysts reconciled fees, finance tracked their impact, and operations made decisions that influenced them. Yet all three lacked a clear understanding of why costs changed.
Hundreds of fee line items need to be reconciled and explained before the billing cycle closes.
Needs to knowWhat changed, and which fees need attention?
Must explain cost movements and anticipate their impact on future budgets.
Needs to knowWhich costs are expected, and which are avoidable?
Routing and authentication changes affect costs, but their impact often surfaces weeks later.
Needs to knowWhich operational changes drove the cost increase?
Starting with very little.
Understanding the ecosystem became our first step.
We started with industry reports, insights from agencies that manually audit payment costs, and conversations with merchants at industry events. This helped us understand how payment costs were structured and where merchants struggled with visibility.
How payment leaders describe cost structures.
Where merchants struggle to see their costs.
Pitching the idea and testing it in person.
We had little to design from.
There were no established product patterns to follow, access to real transaction data was restricted by NDAs, and we were still learning a domain with complex pricing structures. Much of our early design work had to begin with hypotheses rather than established patterns or validated data.
Nothing comparable existed to borrow from.
Real transaction data was off limits.
Pricing structures we were still learning.
Our first cut was four lightweight modules.
We built Overview, Observe, Deviations and Audit to give merchants an initial view of their payment costs and test our assumptions about what they needed.
Taking the first cut to merchants revealed a few gaps.
We used early demos, merchant conversations and pilots to understand where the experience fell short. Here is what became clear:
Modules worked independently rather than guiding merchants through an investigation.
Names like Observe and Deviations didn’t communicate their purpose.
Multiple PSPs and pricing models meant the experience needed to adapt to different configurations.
What the experience needed to get right.
With the product direction established, the next challenge was translating it into an experience that worked for real payment teams. We needed to balance five things while designing.
Fragmented evidence to Traceable insights
Bring together cost signals from different sources while allowing teams to trace every insight back to its underlying data.
Complex data to Clarity without losing detail
Make dense payment information easier to understand without hiding the evidence teams need to verify their decisions.
Two pricing models to One adaptable experience
Support both IC++ and blended pricing without compromising the experience or creating two separate products.
Cost movement to Meaningful context
Help teams distinguish expected cost changes driven by business growth from unexpected increases caused by preventable leakage.
Different teams to One shared cost understanding
Finance, Payments, and Operations approach costs from different perspectives. The experience needed to bring them together around a shared understanding of what changed, why it changed, and what needs attention.
From fragmented signals to one investigation.
Payment cost data is inherently fragmented. Organising the product around processors, fee types or reports would only mirror that complexity.
Instead, we looked at how teams actually investigate costs. Regardless of where they started, they were trying to answer the same questions.
That insight shaped the product strategy.
Principles that shaped the experience.
Payment cost data is dense, and the challenge was to make it easier to investigate without losing the detail teams need to act.
- Anchor on questions.
- Organise the experience around the questions teams need answered.
- Guide, don’t show everything.
- Highlight what needs attention and keep supporting detail accessible.
- Disclose progressively.
- Start broad, identify the driver, then reveal the evidence.
- Surface the signal.
- Bring meaningful deviations forward instead of making teams scan everything.
- Relevance over volume.
- Show what matters to each merchant, not every change.
From the first cut to a connected experience.
The initial product gave us a starting point, but the challenges revealed that more than individual features needed refining. We needed to rethink how information connected, how teams navigated costs, and how the product adapted to different merchant setups.
Through successive iterations, we explored different ways to bring these pieces together into a more coherent investigation experience.
Help merchants understand their payment cost story at a glance — where they stand, what contributes to their costs and what needs attention.
- Deviation-led overview
Bringing active cost deviations upfront to highlight issues.
- Metrics and trends-led overview
Using key metrics and cost trends to establish the overall cost position.
- Cost breakdown-led overview
Exploring how to communicate the composition of payment costs.
- Connected cost investigation
Connecting cost drivers and insights to deeper investigations across modules.
Help analysts understand what makes up their payment costs through deeper analysis across relevant dimensions.
- Multi-dimensional cost analysis
Exploring different ways to analyse costs across regions, corridors, card types, currencies and fee components.
- Summary and detailed breakdowns
Experimenting with how key cost metrics and trends could connect to granular, component-level data for deeper investigation.
- Dedicated cost analysis views
Exploring separate sections for FX exposure, card variants and regional cost behaviour to understand specific cost drivers.
- Drillable vs. non-drillable costs
Exploring how to distinguish costs that support transaction-level breakdowns from bundled or fixed fees that don’t offer the same level of detail.
Help merchants identify unusual payment-cost increases, understand what’s driving them, and distinguish avoidable cost leakage from expected business growth.
- Category-based views
Exploring ways to organise deviations across Downgrades & Penalties, Organic Growth and Non-Transactional Fees.
- Different ways to visualise deviations
Experimenting with summary cards, timelines and charts to show new anomalies, recurring deviations and their cost impact over time.
- Comparing sales and cost movements
Exploring how to compare business growth against cost increases to identify costs that exceed expected growth.
- Deeper investigation of individual spikes
Exploring different ways to break down an increase into expected costs, additional costs and the underlying reasons behind it.
Help merchants verify whether they’re being charged correctly by comparing applied fees against expected rates, and identify discrepancies that lead to additional costs.
- Summary-led audit experience
Exploring ways to surface key discrepancies, extra charges and their financial impact upfront, rather than making merchants navigate individual reports to find them.
- Fee-based audit structure
Exploring different ways to organise audit reports around Interchange, Scheme and Processor fees, with nested breakdowns across networks and card types.
- Pricing model comparisons
Exploring how to compare applied and expected costs across IC++ and Blended pricing models, accounting for the different levels of detail each supports.
- Discrepancy identification and traceability
Exploring ways to highlight rate mismatches, overcharges and other fee discrepancies, while connecting summary-level findings to detailed rate comparisons.
Help merchants anticipate upcoming payment network changes and understand how they could affect their payment costs.
- Different ways to present network updates
Exploring calendar, timeline and feed-based views to organise network announcements and upcoming fee changes.
- Announced dates vs. effective dates
Exploring ways to distinguish when a network change is announced from when it actually takes effect, including changes with delayed implementation.
- Merchant-specific relevance
Exploring how to identify which network updates apply to a merchant’s payment setup, rather than presenting every announcement as equally relevant.
- Estimated financial impact
Exploring ways to prioritise relevant updates based on their potential impact on the merchant’s payment costs, instead of simply listing upcoming changes.
From fragmented costs to a single cost story.
With the investigation flow established, the next challenge was turning it into a cohesive product experience.
Each module served a distinct purpose, but together they needed to feel like a single investigation that teams could navigate naturally every month.
What's my cost story at a glance?
Before investigating anomalies or optimising costs, teams need to understand where they stand today.
Overview brings fragmented payment cost signals into one place, giving teams a unified view of their total costs, key metrics and cost composition.
It works across different merchant setups, from single processors to multi-PSP configurations, and from blended pricing to transparent IC++ models.
Before any investigation begins, teams need answers to three questions:
- What am I paying today?
- What’s driving my costs?
- Where should I investigate?
Where is my cost coming from?
A total cost only tells part of the story. Teams need to understand what contributes to it and where they can investigate further.
Drill-Down separates costs with available component-level data from those that cannot be broken down further. This gives analysts the flexibility to group and filter costs across processors, fee types, business units and card types, tracing the underlying drivers without implying detail that isn’t available.
Drill-Down helps teams answer three questions:
- What makes up my total cost?
- Which segments contribute to it?
- How much of that cost can I investigate further?
Growth, or something worth investigating?
Not every increase in payment cost signals a problem. Fee Spikes helps teams understand whether cost movements come from business growth, non-transactional charges, or downgrades and penalties, and identify those that may need attention.
Instead of manually scanning reports and transaction data, teams can see meaningful deviations, understand their impact and investigate the underlying reasons.
Every spike ultimately comes down to three questions:
- What changed?
- What is driving it?
- Does it require action?
Fee Spikes explains what changed. But teams also need to verify whether the fees they were charged match what was agreed.
Was I charged correctly?
Audit is the merchant’s fee book. It lists every fee applied and sets it against what was agreed with the PSP. Processor invoices show what was charged, but rarely whether it was right.
CPS Retail$4,892
EIRF$2,147
The challenge was bringing together multiple layers of information (contracted rates, applied rates, fee variances, and transaction-level evidence) into a single verification flow.
Every audit ultimately comes down to three questions:
- Was I charged correctly?
- What was actually charged?
- What should I have been charged?
Instead of forcing teams to manually reconcile invoices, contracts, and transaction exports, the experience progressively moved from summary-level variances down to transaction-level evidence, making every discrepancy traceable.
What will upcoming network changes cost me?
Card networks like Visa and Mastercard regularly introduce new fees, revise existing programs, and update qualification rules. Although these changes are published weeks in advance, they are often buried inside dense technical documentation.
For merchants, the challenge wasn't access to information. It was understanding which updates would actually affect their business and what their financial impact would be. Without that visibility, teams often discovered the impact only after it appeared on the following month's invoice.
I designed Forecast to translate network updates into merchant-specific insights by modelling upcoming changes against each merchant's transaction behaviour.
It helps teams answer three questions:
- What changes are coming?
- What will the impact be?
- What should we do next?
With Forecast, the investigation no longer ended with understanding what happened. Teams could start preparing for what happens next.
From a concept to real merchant traction.
HyperSense evolved from an internal concept into a product validated by enterprise merchants.
Through demos, pilots, and customer conversations, we confirmed that payment cost visibility wasn't just an operational problem; it was a business-critical one worth solving.
Business Impact
Presented HyperSense to 20+ enterprise merchants, including Apple and SpaceX.
Piloted the product with six merchants using real payment cost data.
Two pilot merchants progressed into commercial engagements, signalling early market traction.
What changed for merchants
Teams get one clear view of where their costs come from and why they move.
Merchants understood their cost story the day they received their reports, instead of waiting on a manual audit.
Teams could go back to their PSP about a discrepancy or anomaly before the billing cycle closed.
2–3 discrepancies surfaced in pilot data, worth hundreds of dollars. An early signal at pilot scale.
While HyperSense began as a merchant-facing observability product, the investigation uncovered a larger opportunity upstream.
Many of the cost decisions that merchants struggle to understand originate within banks, processors, and network programs.
We're now applying the same principles of cost visibility and intelligence to financial institutions, helping them understand and manage payment costs.
Thank you for taking the time to follow the journey.