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| SumUp | myPOS | |
|---|---|---|
| In person — domestic consumer card | 1.69% | 1.10% + 7p✓ |
| In person — American Express | 1.69%✓ | 2.45% + 7p |
| In person — EEA consumer card | 1.69%✓ | 2.20% + 7p |
| In person — business, commercial and non-EEA cards | 1.69%✓ | 2.85% + 7p |
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 reviewsReserve Bank of India directive to pause onboarding of new online merchants
Razorpay · December 2022 – December 2023
Assets Recovery Agency v. Flutterwave Payments Technology Ltd and others (High Court of Kenya)
Flutterwave · July 2022 – November 2023
FTC v. First American Payment Systems, L.P., Eliot Management Group and Think Point Financial
Deluxe Merchant Services · 29 July 2022 (refund claims opened 28 February 2024)
De Nederlandsche Bank order subject to penalty against Yoursafe B.V. (Verotel's licensed entity) for late submission of audited 2024 annual accounts
Verotel · 2026-02-05
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
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.
Verotel is an Amsterdam internet payment service provider that has billed adult, webcam and other online-entertainment sites since January 1998. It is a trade name of Yoursafe B.V., an electronic money institution licensed by De Nederlandsche Bank in 2019 and owned by Verotel International B.V. Unlike most of its high-risk peers it publishes its entire fee schedule: a flat 15.5% on the Basic account, 13.0–14.0% by weekly volume on Premium, a 1.5% surcharge on recurring charges, no chargeback or refund fees, and a 10% holdback kept for 26 weeks on every account. The trade-off is the price itself — roughly five times a mainstream rate — a merchant agreement that lets Verotel terminate without cause and hold post-cancellation funds for six months, a one-star Trustpilot record, and a February 2026 order subject to penalty from the Dutch central bank for late annual accounts.
Dodo Payments is a merchant-of-record billing platform for software, SaaS and AI products, founded in 2024 in Bengaluru by Rishabh Goel and Ayush Agarwal and backed by a $1.1 million pre-seed round in February 2025. It undercuts Paddle and Lemon Squeezy with a published 4% + 40¢ on US card and wallet payments, adds 1.5% on international cards, 0.5% on subscriptions and 3% on PayPal and BNPL, and onboards sellers from about 177 countries, including individuals without a company. Payouts run twice a month by default with a $50 threshold. Its 3.1 Trustpilot score over 124 reviews splits almost evenly between five-star praise for onboarding and one-star complaints about accounts closed with balances held for 120 days, and its master agreement still quotes 5% + 50¢ eight months after the pricing page moved to 4% + 40¢.
BILL, still widely known as Bill.com, is the largest US accounts-payable and accounts-receivable payments platform for small and mid-sized businesses: 479,300 businesses, $98 billion of payment volume in the quarter to June 2026 and $1.65 billion of annual revenue, run from San Jose by founder René Lacerte since 2006 and listed on the NYSE since 2019. It charges per user — $49, $65 or $89 a month on the Essentials, Team and Corporate plans, custom for Enterprise — plus per-payment fees that it publishes in full: 59¢ per ACH, $1.99 per mailed cheque, free virtual-card and foreign-currency wires, 2.9% to pay or be paid by card, and 1% (minimum $9.99, maximum $100) to send money instantly. Its Spend & Expense card product, the former Divvy, is free. Licensed as a money transmitter in all 50 states, it is a serious, regulated piece of infrastructure; it is also a subscription business with a complicated fee table, uneven support and a stream of complaints about payments held in transit.
TD Merchant Solutions is the merchant-services arm of TD Bank, N.A., the Cherry Hill, New Jersey bank that operates as 'America's Most Convenient Bank' from Maine to Florida and is owned by Toronto-Dominion Bank. Like most US bank merchant programs it is built on Fiserv: the hardware is Clover, the gateway third-party reviewers identify is Fiserv's Payeezy, and the Clover trademark disclosure on TD's own page names First Data. Like its bank peers it publishes flat rates, and its in-person rate is the lowest headline figure among the big-bank programs we cover. As of September 2026 the small-business page quotes 2.5% + $0.15 for swiped, tapped and chip transactions and 3.5% + $0.15 for keyed, phone and e-commerce payments, with customised pricing available through its Payment Advisors, and it promises funds in a TD settlement account by 6 AM ET the next business day. The catch is the contract. The current offer — a free Clover Go, terminal or Clover station worth $179 to $1,025 — requires a three-year Merchant Solutions processing agreement and an active TD business checking account, and TD's own footnote says an account terminated before the end of that term will be charged the value of the device, solution or credit it received. Third-party reviewers additionally report a $495 early-termination fee and $19.95-a-month PCI and gateway charges that TD does not publish. The bank behind it is also mid-remediation: TD Bank, N.A. pleaded guilty in October 2024 to Bank Secrecy Act and money-laundering conspiracy charges, paid about $3.09 billion in penalties and accepted a cap on its US assets. That does not touch card processing, but it is the counterparty on the merchant agreement.
Polar (polar.sh) is an open-source merchant of record and billing platform for developers selling software, SaaS subscriptions and digital products. It is run by Polar Software, Inc., a Delaware corporation whose team is based in Stockholm, and was founded in 2022 by Birk Jernström, who co-founded the e-commerce platform Tictail, sold it to Shopify in 2018 and then led product for Shopify's Shop app. Polar launched version 1.0 of its billing platform in September 2024 and raised a $10 million seed round led by Accel in June 2025, with angels from Shopify, Vercel, Supabase, Raycast, Resend and Framer. As merchant of record it is the legal seller of everything sold through it — it collects and remits US sales tax, EU VAT, Canadian GST and other taxes, carries chargeback liability and issues the invoices — and it charges a single platform fee on top of that. That fee changed on 27 May 2026. Organisations created before that date keep an 'Early Member' rate of 4% + 40¢ plus 0.5% on subscriptions indefinitely; new organisations pay 5% + 50¢ on the free Starter plan or buy down the rate with Pro ($20 a month, 3.8% + 40¢), Growth ($100, 3.6% + 35¢) or Scale ($400, 3.4% + 30¢). International (non-US) cards add 1.5%, disputes cost $15 each regardless of outcome, payouts go through Stripe Connect at Stripe's pass-through fees ($2 per active payout month, 0.25% + 25¢ per payout), and organisations created on or after 12 May 2026 have a seven-day settlement delay before they can withdraw. Its code is Apache 2.0 on GitHub, its SDKs and framework adapters are widely praised, and its weak points are the ones you would expect of a seed-stage company two years into operating: thin support, fixed dunning you cannot customise, and pricing for newcomers that is now level with Paddle and Lemon Squeezy rather than below them.
Paystone is a London, Ontario payment processor that calls itself Canada's largest bank-independent payment processor. It was founded in 2009 as Zomaron by Tarique Al-Ansari, who remains chief executive, rebranded to Paystone in November 2019 when it bought the Montreal gift-card and loyalty company DataCandy, and has since grown by acquisition — NiceJob in 2021, Canadian Payment Services in 2022 and the TSXV-listed loyalty firm Ackroo, for about C$21 million, in 2025 — on the back of roughly C$99 million raised in 2021, including C$30 million (about US$23.8 million) from Crédit Mutuel Equity. Its website says it serves more than 38,000 business locations and processes over $10 billion a year. The offer is interchange-plus with published starting points: in-person credit from 1.26% + 5¢ and debit from 5¢ a transaction on a $5-a-month merchant account, online credit from 2.27% + 25¢ on a $15-a-month gateway, a $99 setup fee, no locked-in contract, no cancellation fee and next-business-day deposits. Terminals range from the Ingenico Desk/5000 and Move/5000 to Clover Flex, Mini and Station Duo, and the processing is sold alongside its own DataCandy gift and loyalty programs and NiceJob review software. It is a registered MSP/ISO of U.S. Bank's Canadian branch and Elavon and of Wells Fargo Bank's US and Canadian branches, and a partner of Global Payments Direct and First Data Canada. The complaint record is small — third-party review sites count a handful of BBB complaints, mostly about terminal-rental billing and cancellation timing — and the company's BBB profile is currently under review. 'As low as' pricing means the real rate is a quote.
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.
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