We grade payment processors on pricing transparency, features, support and contract terms — then publish the reasoning behind every grade.
reviewed
independent
always
The report card
real directory dataStripe
Payfac / Aggregator
PayKings
Agent Office / Reseller
Square
POS & Business Software
The evidence
Rates, fees, payout times and contract terms come from published documentation and public filings — never from a sales call. Each review carries the date it was last fact-checked.
Where a provider doesn't disclose a number, the review says so. We don't estimate, and we don't fill gaps with marketing copy.
The fact sheet
real directory dataHelcim
Fact-checked September 7, 2026
Every value above is published by the provider. A processor that doesn't publish a number gets “Not disclosed” in that cell — never an estimate.
The grade
Pricing transparency, feature set, ease of use, customer support, contract terms and industry reputation — every review scores all six, and the grade is what the scores say it is.
No pay-to-play, no sponsored placements. A provider can't buy a better grade; they can only earn one, and the reasoning is published either way.
The scorecard
real directory dataHelcim
Mean category score 4.5/5
The six weighted scores produce the letter grade — the same rubric for every review in the directory.
Head to head
Same criteria, same evidence, side by side — with a winner called per row and overall, and the reasoning for each call.
Where the honest answer is “it depends on your business”, the comparison says that instead of forcing a verdict. And it's not just the featured matchups — any two of the reviewed processors can be compared.
Head to head
real directory data| Payment Cloud | Durango Merchant Services | |
|---|---|---|
| Published processing rates | None; custom quote | Range only: 1.95%–4.95% discount rate plus 15¢–25¢ per authorisation✓ |
| Monthly account fee | Not disclosed | $15–$60 a month (published range) |
| Application and setup fees | No upfront fee to apply; 'setup fees and reserve requirements vary by business type' | Application $0; 'free application processing'✓ |
| Rolling reserve | 'Vary by business type', discussed before you commit | 0%–10% (published range); its guide says many merchants can expect 5–10% |
Full transparency
Lawsuits, regulatory actions, undisclosed pricing, contract traps — when the evidence turns up a problem, it goes in the review with the same prominence as the praise.
A grade you can trust has to be allowed to be bad. Every item in this feed links to the review that documents it.
Watch out
from published reviewsState attorneys general v. Blackbaud, Inc. (multistate data breach settlement)
Blackbaud Merchant Services (Blackbaud Integrated Payments) · 2023-10-05
In re Blackbaud, Inc. (SEC administrative proceeding)
Blackbaud Merchant Services (Blackbaud Integrated Payments) · 2023-03-09
Federal Trade Commission v. Blackbaud, Inc. (FTC order)
Blackbaud Merchant Services (Blackbaud Integrated Payments) · 2024-05-20
People of the State of California v. Blackbaud, Inc.
Blackbaud Merchant Services (Blackbaud Integrated Payments) · 2024-06-13
Doesn't publish its pricing
ProMerchant
Doesn't publish its pricing
Barclaycard Payments
Documented in the linked reviews — legal actions are listed with case title, date and status.
Top rated
Ranked by grade, then by average category score. Equal grades share a position. An acquirer and an agent office are not the same purchase — pick a category to rank like against like.
Stripe is a leading payment processor known for its developer-friendly API, transparent pricing, and comprehensive suite of payment solutions for businesses of all sizes.
PayKings is a specialized payment processor offering tailored solutions for high-risk industries with a strong emphasis on fraud prevention.
Square offers simple, transparent payment processing ideal for small businesses. Flat-rate pricing, no monthly fees, and excellent software make it a top choice — but account holds and limited support are key concerns.
Helcim is a Calgary-based payment processing company that offers genuinely transparent interchange-plus pricing with no monthly fees, no hidden charges, and a comprehensive suite of free payment tools.
Adyen is a global, enterprise-grade payments platform that unifies acquiring, processing, routing and risk management into a single stack for merchants with international and omnichannel needs.
Shopify Payments is Shopify’s own branded payments service — processed by Stripe, per Shopify’s published processor list — giving merchants one-click access to accepting cards and wallets inside Shopify, simplifying setup and eliminating third-party gateway fees for supported merchants.
The directory
Vagaro is booking, point-of-sale and marketing software for salons, spas, barbers, medical spas, gyms and studios, sold from Pleasanton, California since 2009 by founder and chief executive Fred Helou. Card processing is built in through Vagaro Merchant Services, a registered ISO of PNC Bank, N.A., and priced on two published plans: small merchants under $4,000 a month pay 2.6% + $0.10 for swiped, dipped and tapped cards with no monthly fee, and large merchants above that pay 2.29% + $0.19 for $10 a month. Every keyed, online, card-on-file and membership charge is 3.5% + $0.19 on either plan, card-brand FANF and Mastercard location fees pass through, buy-now-pay-later through Affirm costs 6% + $0.30, and surcharging is not allowed. Deposits arrive the next business day after a batch, with same-day and instant payouts at 1.75%. The software is $30 a month for one calendar (currently $23.99 for the first six months) plus $10 a calendar up to seven, month to month with no cancellation fee, and the US marketplace listing is free — Vagaro only takes a 20% cut when you opt into its Fill My Books promotions. The rate card is clear and competitive in person; the weak spots are the keyed rate, a BBB review score of 1.09 out of 5 with recurring complaints of duplicate charges and hardware warranty disputes, and the lack of any way to pass fees on to clients.
FreshBooks Payments is the built-in way to get paid on a FreshBooks invoice. FreshBooks, the Toronto accounting software company founded in 2003 by Mike McDerment, rebuilt the product on Stripe Connect in 2024, retiring the WePay-powered version in the process, and now runs it as a white-labelled Stripe account you open from inside FreshBooks. It is sold only to businesses in the United States and Canada, on top of a FreshBooks subscription ($23 to $70 a month at list, or the custom Select plan). Published US pricing is 2.9% + $0.30 on domestic consumer cards, 3.5% + $0.30 on American Express and business cards, 1% on ACH with no cap outside Select, 3.5% + $0.30 on anything run through the $20-a-month Advanced Payments add-on (virtual terminal, saved cards, AutoPay), 6% + $0.30 on Affirm and Afterpay, plus 1.5% for cards issued abroad, 2% for currency conversion and $15 per dispute. Card money arrives two business days after the charge once the account is established, but every new account waits seven business days for its first payout, and Stripe's reserves and verification holds apply. There is no monthly fee, no minimum and no contract for the payments product itself. It is convenient and priced at the Stripe standard for small invoices; it is a poor fit for a business collecting large bank transfers, which pay the full 1% with no ceiling.
Blackbaud Merchant Services — renamed Blackbaud Integrated Payments (BBIP) in 2025 — is the payment processing built into Blackbaud's fundraising, school and CRM software: Raiser's Edge NXT, eTapestry, Luminate Online, Blackbaud Tuition Management and the rest. Blackbaud, founded in Charleston, South Carolina in 1981 and listed on Nasdaq, does not process or hold the money itself; under its August 2025 payments terms the designated processor is Stripe, Inc., and each organization signs Stripe's sub-merchant agreement through Blackbaud. The published US rate is 2.99% + $0.30 per card transaction (3.5% + $0.30 on American Express), 1% + $0.30 capped at $5 for ACH, and a $15 chargeback fee, with no setup or monthly processing fee. What the rate card does not show is the rest of the bill: a payment enablement fee charged to every customer with a payments-capable product whether or not they process anything, a new online-form platform fee of 1.5% to 2% on top of processing from 1 July 2026, and a software subscription that renews on a standard three-year term unless you give 45 days' notice. Add the 2020 ransomware breach — a $49.5 million multistate settlement, a $3 million SEC penalty, a $6.8 million California judgment and a 2024 FTC order — and a D- BBB rating for the company, and the convenience of one integrated system carries a real cost. It is the default for organizations already committed to Blackbaud software; it is not a processor anyone picks on its own merits.
Truist Merchant Services is the card-acceptance arm of Truist Bank, the Charlotte, North Carolina bank formed in December 2019 by the merger of BB&T and SunTrust. Unlike most bank programmes, which refer merchants to Fiserv or another processor, Truist Bank is itself the counterparty on the merchant agreement: it bought out its former joint venture, SunTrust Merchant Services, LLC, in 2022 for $175 million and now runs the book directly, and in mid-2025 it began rolling out Truist Merchant Engage, a Pollinate-built dashboard that puts merchant services inside the bank's business-banking experience. The pitch is next-business-day funding into a Truist business checking account, in-house consultants rather than agents, and statement credits for balances of $25,000 or more. The price of that convenience is a contract written for the bank: no published rates, a three-year initial term with one-year auto-renewals, a $500 early-termination fee per merchant account ($250 in a renewal term), and the right to demand a reserve on seven days' notice. It is a reasonable option for a Truist business customer who negotiates; it is not one to sign without reading the Merchant Program Guide.
ProPay is a Lindon, Utah payment facilitator that has sold instant-activation card acceptance to home-based sellers, direct-selling distributors and small merchants since 1997, and now operates as a subsidiary of Global Payments after TSYS bought it for $123.7 million in December 2012. Its model is unusual: an annual membership fee rather than a monthly one, a flat blended rate, funds that settle into a ProPay account before being transferred to your bank for a per-transfer fee, and single-transaction and monthly processing caps that rise only with history. As of September 2026 the public pricing page's rate table is empty, so the only official numbers are a fee schedule that says 'up to 3.50% plus $0.35' per card transaction and an annual membership fee of 'up to $299.95'. The Better Business Bureau shows 240 complaints in three years and an average review score of 1.02 out of 5, and ProPay remains a defendant in the TelexFree pyramid-scheme litigation twelve years after it was filed. It works as a plumbing layer for direct-selling companies; as a standalone merchant account it is hard to recommend over a modern aggregator.
Fresha is the London-based booking and business platform for salons, barbershops, spas and wellness studios, founded as Shedul in 2015 by William Zeqiri and Nick Miller and renamed in 2019. It became a unicorn in May 2026 when KKR invested $80 million at a valuation above $1 billion, at which point it said it served more than 130,000 businesses, handled 35 million appointments a month and about $15 billion a year in gross merchandise value, and was profitable on a $140 million revenue run-rate. Payments are embedded in the software through Adyen for Platforms: as of September 2026 the US rate card is 2.29% plus $0.20 in person (plus $0.10 per Tap to Pay authorisation), 2.79% plus $0.20 online, 3.30% plus $0.20 for manually keyed cards and 5.99% plus $0.30 for Klarna instalments, with payouts the next business day, no contract and no early-termination fee. The software itself stopped being free in 2025 — plans are $19.95 a month for one person or $14.95 per bookable team member — and clients who find you on the Fresha marketplace cost a one-off 20% commission with a $6 minimum. Trustpilot rates it 4.8 from more than 7,000 reviews. It grades B+ on clear pricing and terms, with the marks held back by the marketplace fee, the 2025 pricing shift and the payout holds that come with any aggregator.
Razorpay is the largest online payment aggregator in India, founded in Bengaluru in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar and licensed by the Reserve Bank of India as an online, offline and cross-border payment aggregator. It charges a published flat 2% platform fee plus 18% GST on domestic cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets, with no setup fee, no annual charge and free refunds, and reported operating revenue of ₹3,783 crore for the year to March 2025 on an annualised payment volume it put at $180 billion. The product is genuinely good and the pricing is clear; the reason it does not grade higher is the other side of the ledger: a Trustpilot score of 1.4 from 449 reviews dominated by frozen accounts and held settlements, a year-long RBI ban on onboarding new merchants that ended in December 2023, and a corporate story — a March 2025 reverse flip from the United States to India, a one-time charge that pushed it into loss, and a confidential IPO filing in June 2026 — that is still being written.
Flutterwave is the payment aggregator that most international businesses use to collect from customers across Africa. Founded in 2016 by Olugbenga Agboola and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, headquartered in San Francisco and Lagos, licensed in 34 African countries and holding Nigeria's switching-and-processing licence since 2022 and a microfinance-bank licence since April 2026, it says it has processed more than a billion transactions worth over $50 billion and was valued at $3.2 billion in June 2026 when Ripple joined its Series E. Pricing is published per country and is simple — 2% on local cards in Nigeria, 2.9% on mobile money in Kenya, 4.8% on any international card since November 2024 — with next-day local settlement and no monthly fee. The B-minus reflects a record a merchant should read before relying on it: Kenya froze about $52 million of its funds in 2022 on money-laundering suspicions (the case was withdrawn in 2023 and the money returned), it still has no Kenyan licence of its own, and a 2023 technical glitch let POS merchants move about ₦19 billion out of the platform.
Deluxe Merchant Services is the card-acquiring arm of Deluxe Corporation, the Minneapolis company founded in 1915 whose largest product line is still printing checks (32.4% of 2025 revenue) and which now earns 18.7% of its revenue from merchant processing. The business is First American Payment Systems of Fort Worth, Texas, founded in 1992 and bought by Deluxe for $960 million in June 2021, plus Celero Commerce, bought for about $625 million on 31 July 2026; together they process roughly $70 billion a year for around 210,000 merchants as a registered ISO of Fifth Third Bank, which Deluxe says makes it one of the ten largest non-bank acquirers in the United States. The scale, the listed parent and 24/7 support are real advantages. Against them: Deluxe publishes no rates, First American's model is tiered pricing on a three-year auto-renewing agreement with an early-termination fee that third-party reviewers put at up to $495, and in July 2022 First American settled a Federal Trade Commission action over hidden exit fees and unauthorised withdrawals for $4.9 million in refunds.
Compare processors on published facts — rates, fees, contract terms and support — with a grade that explains itself.
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Expert insights and industry analysis.
Stripe, Square, PayPal, Shopify and the rest all say the fee from the original sale is not returned when you refund it. Visa's and Mastercard's own rate tables show the issuer returns interchange on a credit-card refund, and nothing on debit. What each processor keeps, and when a void saves the whole fee.
Instant Checkout in ChatGPT launched in September 2025, charged 4% from January and was withdrawn in March. Visa's CEO now says consumers shop with AI and pay on the seller's site. What each protocol does, what your processor has signed up to, what it costs, and why the merchant is still the merchant of record.
Visa's own rate table carries a Small Merchant programme: lower interchange on consumer credit cards for any business under $280,000 a year in Visa credit sales. Whether a cent of it reaches you depends entirely on how your processor prices. We put a $50 sale through the table and through eight reviewed processors.
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