In late 2017, FleetCor CEO Ronald Clarke emailed his team asking for "opportunities to get more late fee revenue in 2018, thru a higher rate, less/no grace days." He was not running a fuel discount company. He was running a fee company that used fuel discounts as the front door.

Cut costs with a fleet fuel card. If you have run trucks or vans for any length of time, a rep has said those words to you. A few cents off per gallon. Sounds right. It is not.

The research on this is worth reading, because a federal court already did the work. In early 2026, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a federal district court ruling against Corpay, the company formerly known as FleetCor. The appeals court cited what it called a "rampant history of illegal acts." Later that year, Corpay and Clarke agreed to pay $100 million to settle the case.

The FTC found that Corpay's fee practices cost tens of thousands of small business customers more than $500 million. Most of those fees were never agreed to. Many were never disclosed. Of that total, $213 million came from late fees alone. Some of those late fees were charged on payments made on time. FleetCor itself had blocked the timely payment, then billed the customer for being late.

Here is the number that tells you what kind of business this was from the start. At its 2010 IPO, FleetCor's own S-1 filing showed that roughly 54% of its total revenue came from fees and charges. Not fuel. Not the discount. Fees. The discount was the storefront. The fees were the register.

The per-gallon savings did not fail these operators. The per-gallon savings distracted them from where the money was going.

A survey of Corpay's own customers found that just 7.02% had been told about all the fees before being charged. That is not a rounding error. That is a design choice.

The method was simple. FleetCor often waited several billing cycles before it started to charge certain fees. By then, the operator had stopped reading the statement line by line. The fee showed up after the checking stopped.

There is a name for this in the literature. Seim and Vitorino published a study in the RAND Journal of Economics in 2025 on what researchers call drip pricing. The pattern: price the base product below its true standalone cost. Price the add-on above it. Count on the buyer not tracking the total. The base product draws them in. The add-on is where the margin lives.

That is not a billing problem. It is a pricing model.

The problem is not the discount. The problem is that the discount replaces the math. An operator sees three cents off per gallon and stops there. The eight other fee lines on the statement never get added up, divided by gallons, and compared to the pump price without the card. The per-gallon number the rep quoted becomes the only number the operator tracks.

It is the wrong number.

The better principle is short: measure net cost, not gross discount. Once that is clear, three moves follow from it.

Pull your last three monthly statements. Add up every fee line, then divide by total gallons bought in the same period. That number is your real per-gallon cost, fees included. This is the part most operators skip, not because it is hard, but because the card was sold as a solved problem.

Take your net per-gallon card cost from Move 1. Set it next to the average retail pump price you would have paid without the card in those same months. If the card cost is higher, the discount is not saving you money. It is costing you money with a smaller number on the front.

Run Move 1 on the first of every month. Drip pricing counts on you not looking. A monthly check removes that edge and catches drift in thirty days, not three years.

Running this for ninety days does something the advice never did:

You see which fee lines grow over time and which stay flat. You see whether the card company added charges after your first few billing cycles. You see the true gap between what the rep promised and what the statement says. And you see whether the card saves money at all once every line is counted.

At the end of ninety days, ask three things.

→ What moved the per-gallon number up or down?

→ What looked like savings but left no trace in your actual fuel spend?

→ What fee showed up more than once that you did not agree to?

That is the difference between advice that sounds right and a system that proves itself.

Clarke wrote that email to grow the fee model, not to hide it. The operator who pulls a statement and runs the math now holds the same information Clarke's team held. The question is whether the next fuel card bill gets read the way it was written, or the way the rep described it.