Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

C+

The terminal company that became a payments company. Verifone has been making card-reading hardware since 1981 and is the device behind a very large share of the world's checkout counters, but the merchant-facing business it has assembled around that hardware — Verifone Payments acquiring, plus the 2Checkout platform it bought in 2020 — is a much weaker story. Its US BBB profile carries an F for failing to answer complaints, its own .com Trustpilot page sits at 1.5 out of 5, and no acquiring rate is published anywhere. The only prices Verifone publishes are 2Checkout's, and those are merchant-of-record rates for selling software, not merchant-account rates.

The one place Verifone publishes a number is 2Checkout, its merchant-of-record platform for selling software and digital goods. As of 26 August 2026 the published plans are 2Sell at 3.5% + $0.35 per successful sale, 2Subscribe at 4.5% + $0.45 per successful sale, 2Monetize at "tailored pricing", and 4Enterprise at custom pricing. Note that 2Monetize used to carry a published headline rate and no longer does — older third-party pages still quote a 6.0% + $0.50 figure that 2Checkout's own pricing page no longer shows. These are merchant-of-record rates, which bundle global tax and regulatory compliance and are not comparable to a merchant-account discount rate.

2Checkout's published plan comparison lists a weekly payout period on all three self-serve plans, with payouts available in USD, GBP and EUR and other currencies on request. Verifone Payments does not publish a funding timetable.

★ 1.5 trustpilotRead review →

Tilled

A Boulder, Colorado company that sells payments infrastructure to software companies rather than merchant accounts to businesses. Tilled claims to have coined the term PayFac-as-a-Service: a software vendor gets the economics of being a payment facilitator — a share of the processing revenue on every transaction its customers make — without taking on the registration, underwriting and compliance burden of actually becoming one. It is one of the very few companies in this catalogue that publishes its own prices in public, which is the main reason it grades where it does.

Tilled does not set a fixed merchant rate — the software platform does, and keeps a share of the margin. Tilled's own revenue calculator uses 2.9% + $0.30 with no monthly account fee as the assumed price to the end merchant and 2.27% + $0.15 as the assumed partner cost. Those are illustrative assumptions on Tilled's own pricing page, not a quote; your actual buy rate depends on your volume and mix.

Not published. Tilled does not state a settlement timetable for merchants onboarded through its platform, and payout timing is one of the things a software platform will need to be able to answer for its own customers — so establish it before you build.

Expert grade BRead review →

Priority Commerce

ISO

A genuinely large US payments and banking company that most merchants have never heard of, because for twenty years it sold almost entirely through ISOs and software partners rather than under its own name. Founded in Georgia in 2005 as Priority Payment Systems, it listed on NASDAQ as PRTH in 2018 and now reports 1.8 million customer accounts and over $150 billion of annual volume. It publishes no rates, no contract length and no termination fee, and its BBB complaint file — 37 in three years, 21 of them closed in the last twelve months — is dominated by billing that continued after merchants believed they had cancelled.

Not published. Priority's merchant services page markets fee-based solutions heavily — cash discounting, convenience fees, service fees and surcharging — which is a route to pushing cost onto the cardholder rather than lowering it. Check your state's surcharging rules and your card-network obligations before agreeing to any of it.

Priority markets same-day funding as a headline merchant-services capability on its own site. Eligibility criteria, cut-off times and any premium for it are not published — confirm all three in writing, because same-day funding is commonly conditional on batch time and account standing.

Expert grade B-Read review →

Fortis

An embedded-payments specialist that sells to software platforms first and merchants second. Fortis plugs card acceptance into ERP and business software — Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage — and is registered as both a payment facilitator and an ISO for several banks, including KeyBank and Fifth Third. It took a growth recapitalisation from Audax Private Equity alongside existing investor Lovell Minnick in March 2025. It publishes no pricing at all, and the third-party sources describing its contract terms flatly contradict each other, which is the single most important thing to know before you sign.

Not published. Fortis's proposition to software platforms is payments monetisation — the platform earns a share of the processing revenue — so the rate a merchant sees is often set in part by the software vendor, not by Fortis alone. Ask your software provider who sets the rate and what their share of it is.

Not published. Fortis markets accounts-receivable acceleration and cash-flow improvement as core benefits but attaches no settlement timetable to either. Get the funding time in writing.

★ 3.6 trustpilotRead review →

DirectPayNet

High-Risk Specialist

A small high-risk merchant account brokerage aimed squarely at online sellers — supplements, coaching, subscriptions, dropshipping, digital products, high-ticket offers — that mainstream processors decline. It does not underwrite or process anything itself; it places you with acquiring banks and negotiates your terms, then works on the things that actually keep a high-risk account alive: chargeback prevention through Ethoca and Verifi, approval-rate optimisation, backup MIDs and reserve terms. Unusually for the sector, it publishes a genuine fee-range guide. Unusually badly, it publishes no corporate address and has no meaningful independent review record at all.

DirectPayNet does not quote a rate — as a broker it negotiates one with an acquirer for your specific business. What it does publish, in a fee guide on its own site, is the range it says high-risk merchants should expect: 3–6% per transaction against 1.5–3% for low-risk, plus $0.10–$0.50 per transaction. Its own worked example puts a supplement merchant processing $100,000 a month at a 4.0% rate on roughly $4,730 of total monthly cost, or about a 4.73% effective rate. Those are the company's own published figures for the market, not a quote to you, but they are an honest benchmark and more than most high-risk brokers will put in writing.

Not published. High-risk settlement is usually slower than standard and is set by the acquirer rather than the broker.

Expert grade B-Read review →

Rapyd

A London-headquartered, Israeli-founded fintech-as-a-service platform that sells collection, payouts and multi-currency accounts through one API. Its 2025 purchase of PayU's Latin America and Africa business for $610 million gave it direct local acquiring in six Latin American countries plus Nigeria and South Africa — genuinely hard-to-reach markets. It is built for platforms and marketplaces rather than small merchants, publishes almost no acquiring pricing, and its public merchant reviews are poor.

Rapyd does publish full rates for several Latin American markets, which is unusual and useful: Chile at 3.49% per transaction, Colombia at 3.29% + COP 300 (plus local income tax, ICA and VAT withholdings), and Peru at 3.40% + PEN 0.69, each with per-method minimums. These are card-not-present local-method rates for those countries and are not indicative of what a US or European merchant would be quoted.

★ 3 trustpilotRead review →

Paddle

A London merchant of record for software, SaaS and AI companies, founded in 2012 and used by more than 6,000 digital product businesses by its own July 2025 count. It publishes one flat price — 5% + 50¢ — and in exchange becomes the legal seller of your product, taking on global sales tax and VAT registration, filing and liability. That is a real transfer of risk, and it is expensive: roughly double a card processor's rate, paid out once a month rather than daily.

5% + 50¢ per checkout transaction, published on the pricing page, with no monthly fee and no migration fee. That single rate covers payment processing, global sales tax and VAT compliance, subscription billing, fraud and chargeback protection and support. Paddle notes that products under $10, and merchants who need invoicing, should contact it for custom pricing, and custom rates below 5% are reported to be available at high volume.

Monthly, not daily. Paddle processes payouts on the 1st of each month and sends them by the 15th, then up to three working days to arrive depending on method. Payouts go by wire transfer or Payoneer. There is no on-demand withdrawal — this is the single biggest operational difference between Paddle and an ordinary payment processor, and it needs to be modelled into your cash flow before you migrate.

★ 3.9 trustpilotRead review →

Merchant One

ISO

C+

A Miami Beach independent sales organization, incorporated in 2002 and bought by Fiserv in December 2022 for about $300 million — a fact almost no review of it mentions, and one that undercuts its own "we're not a broker or middleman" claim. It publishes headline rates, which is rare for an ISO, but they are qualified-tier rates on a tiered plan, and its Trustpilot score of 4.9 and its BBB customer-review average of 1.02 across 56 reviews describe two different companies.

Ecommerce is offered but not separately priced on the site. Merchant One states that interchange-plus is available on request — ask for it, because it is the only structure on offer where the downgrade tiers cannot be used against you.

Next-day funding is advertised on the home page. Independent reviewers report that in practice deposits often land two to three days later than advertised — treat next-day as a best case rather than a commitment.

★ 4.9 trustpilotRead review →

Humboldt Merchant Services

High-Risk Specialist

One of the oldest specialty merchant account providers in the United States — writing accounts for adult, CBD, firearms, credit repair, online pharmacy, gambling, telemedicine and travel since the early 1990s. It holds a BBB A+ and has been accredited since 2011, with 15 complaints in the last three years — low for this segment, but not the near-empty file some reviews suggest, and almost all of them are about reserve funds being held. Three things to know: it publishes no pricing at all, it holds reserves that merchants say run into six figures, and it is now a North brand, so a quote from Humboldt and a quote from North American Bancard are not two independent quotes.