Merchant Cost Consulting vs. weAudit: How to Choose a Processing Fee Auditor

The Short Version

Every Merchant Cost Consulting fact above is drawn from merchantcostconsulting.com, their partners’ published pages, or public profiles as of July 2026. If anything changes, we will update this page.

The Biggest Difference: Who Keeps the Savings

Both firms find overcharges. The difference is what happens to the money after it is found.

There is also a quieter problem with percentage-of-savings pricing: someone has to decide what counts as a saving, and the party doing the counting is the one being paid by the count. With a flat published fee, there is nothing to interpret. Savings are simply your old cost minus your new cost, and all of it stays yours.

Two Roads Into This Industry

Merchant Cost Consulting was co-founded in January 2017 by Colin O’Keefe and Tony Bolduc. Their website describes years of payment processing experience and says the team knows “every trick in the book” (merchantcostconsulting.com, as of July 2026). Their own public LinkedIn profiles, as of July 2026, tell the fuller story: one co-founder graduated in 2014 with a communication degree, with prior experience in college sports media; the other graduated in 2014 and spent a year as a professional baseball player. On both profiles, the first payments-industry role listed is co-founding MCC itself. One co-founder’s profile also lists a separate full-time role since January 2025, co-founding another cost-reduction startup, while MCC continues to operate.

None of that is a character flaw. Everyone starts somewhere, and nine years of contingency auditing is real experience. Both of their statements can even be true. But when a firm tells you it knows every trick in the book, the question a merchant should ask is simple: where did they learn the tricks, and from whom?

weAudit’s founder, Robert Day, ran inside the machine itself: a former executive at Fifth Third Processing Solutions, the payments giant that became Vantiv, then Worldpay, and is today part of Global Payments, a combined company serving more than 6 million merchant locations and processing $3.7 trillion in payment volume a year. He spent years watching how processors construct statements, layer fees, and count on merchants never reading the fine print. Then he crossed the aisle. weAudit exists because someone who helped build the playbook decided merchants deserved someone who could read it.

Studying the playbook from across the table is honest work. We simply think there is no substitute for having held it. And do not take our word for any of this: look up both firms’ leadership on LinkedIn and read the career histories for yourself. We encourage it.

The Technology Behind the Audit

weAudit runs every statement through MADR (Mass Analysis Data Reporting), our proprietary in-house analysis engine, refined across thousands of merchant statements. We invested more than $1 million to build it, and it remains one of our largest ongoing expenses for a reason merchants will recognize: the card networks change their processing rules and rates every April and October, and MADR is updated on that same cycle, every single time. Your audit never runs on last year’s rules. Because we built and maintain the engine ourselves, we can also adapt it the moment processors invent a new fee, and they invent new fees constantly.

Merchant Cost Consulting’s materials reference “a unique software” used to review client statements monthly. Its name, who built it, and who owns it are not disclosed. That does not mean it is bad. It means you should ask.

Seven Questions to Ask Any Processing Auditor Before You Sign

1. How do you get paid, and for how long? A flat fee ends the discussion. A percentage of savings should make you ask: what percentage, measured how, running for how many months or years?
2. Do you receive any money from processors? Referral fees, commissions, revenue share, anything. An auditor paid by the industry it audits is not working only for you. If the answer is no, it should be in writing on their website.
3. Can I leave anytime? Month to month means the auditor has to earn your business every single month.
4. Is there a cancellation or early termination fee? This is the one that stings most. An early termination fee is a classic processor lock-in tactic, the very thing a fee auditor is supposed to protect you from. Ask exactly what it costs to leave before the term ends, and get the answer in writing.
5. Who decides what counts as “savings”? If their paycheck is a percentage of savings, the answer matters a great deal.
6. What technology analyzes my statements, and who owns it?
7. Has anyone on your executive team been an executive for a credit card processor? Not an ISO. Not an agent. Not a consultant who negotiated against them. An executive inside one. There is a difference, and it is the difference between studying the machine and having helped build it.

We will answer all seven for weAudit right now: flat published fee; not one dollar from any processor, ever, and it says so on our website; month to month, backed by our 60-Day Love-The-Results-Or-Don’t-Pay Guarantee; no cancellation fee and no early termination fee, ever; savings are simply your old cost minus your new cost; MADR is ours; and our founder is a former executive of the processing giant now known as Worldpay, part of Global Payments.

Call Merchant Cost Consulting and ask them the same seven. We mean that sincerely. An informed merchant is our best customer.

What We Have in Common

In fairness, the two firms agree on a lot. Neither requires you to switch processors. Both start with a free statement analysis. Both monitor statements after the initial win so fees do not creep back. Both will tell you the payments industry buries merchants in deceptive fees, because it does. If you choose Merchant Cost Consulting, you will likely still come out ahead of doing nothing. We simply believe that when the audit is done, the savings should be yours. This is why we also guarantee the largest savings, or our services are free.

Third-Party Validation

weAudit.com is BBB Accredited (since 2015) and holds an A+ rating with zero complaints on file, per bbb.org as of July 2026. In an industry built on fine print, an A+ and a complaint record that reads zero is not luck. It is the flat-fee model working exactly as designed: when clients keep all the savings and can leave month to month, there is nothing to complain about. As of July 2026, a nationwide search of bbb.org returns no profile under the Merchant Cost Consulting name. That does not mean anything negative about them; BBB participation is voluntary. It does mean that if third-party accountability matters to you, only one of the two firms on this page has put itself on that record for over a decade.

In 2019, the St. Louis BBB awarded weAudit its Torch Award, the Bureau’s recognition for ethics in the marketplace. On Google, weAudit holds 5.0 stars across 26 reviews (as of July 2026). You can read what our clients say, in their own words, on our testimonials page. [TO FILL BEFORE PUBLISHING — if you include a Google comparison, insert MCC’s Google stars and review count here from a dated screenshot, and publish whatever the numbers honestly show; otherwise leave this to the BBB point above.]

One more difference you can hold in your hands: our founder wrote the book on this industry. The Great American Heist, with a foreword by Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington, documents exactly how processors engineer their fees, and it is the playbook weAudit runs every day. We know of no equivalent from the other side of this page.

Comparing other auditors as well? See our Verisave vs. weAudit comparison.

Have you compared both firms as a customer, or spotted something on this page that needs correcting? We would genuinely like to hear it, whatever the outcome: [email protected]. That invitation extends to Merchant Cost Consulting too.