Foreign fees really should be quite close to your other fees. You take a hit on the fact that they are "foreign" but they actually fall under a lower interchange category, so it comes out a wash for the most part. There should be no float-related costs, gateway fees are standard for auth.net, most reasonable places won't charge you PCI fees if you fill out the simple questionnaire, etc. With a decently-priced interchange plus merchant account and gateway, you should come out much cheaper.
Disclosure: I'm with FeeFighters (http://feefighters.com). We have a bundled merchant account/gateway (http://samurai.feefighters.com) that is a bit different from Stripe, priced at 2.3% + $0.30, but has a monthly fee of $25 and AmEx is separate (2.9%+$0.15).