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| Shift4 | Toast POS | |
|---|---|---|
| Published monthly software price | Not published - quoted per restaurant | $0 on the Starter Kit; $69 per month on the Point of Sale plan✓ |
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 reviewsZip Co Ltd v Firstmac Ltd [2026] HCA 16
Zip · 2026-05-13
Authentic Brands Group v. Bolt Financial, Inc.
Bolt · 2022-07-06
Fanatics, Inc. v. Bolt Financial, Inc.
Bolt · 2024-09-12
NLRB case 16-CA-314545, FPT Operating Company, LLC d/b/a Talus Pay
Talus Pay · 2023-03-21
Doesn't publish its pricing
Payabli
Doesn't publish its pricing
Fullsteam
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
Payabli is a Miami embedded-payments company — legally Centavo, Inc., trading as Payabli — founded in 2020 by William Corbera and Joseph Elias Phillips, who run it as co-chief executives. It does not sell merchant accounts to businesses. It sells payments infrastructure to software companies, so that a property-management system, an HOA portal, a school-district platform or a field-service tool can take payments inside its own product and earn on them, without going through the cost and compliance burden of becoming a payment facilitator itself. The stack is organised as Pay In for acceptance and merchant onboarding, Pay Out for payables, and Pay Ops for the operational layer around both, with a low-code builder called Creator and an AI feature set branded Amigo layered on top. The company is a registered payment facilitator of PNC Bank and Huntington Bank and a registered ISO/MSP of Merrick Bank — an unusually clear disclosure for this part of the market. It raised a $28m Series B in June 2025 led by Fika Ventures and QED Investors, bringing total funding to about $60m, and reported 7x year-on-year revenue growth, more than 50,000 merchants on the platform and billions of dollars in live processing volume.
Fullsteam is a payments and vertical-software holding company founded in 2018 and headquartered in Auburn, Alabama, with a second base in Atlanta. Its model is unusual enough to explain before anything else: rather than selling merchant accounts directly, Fullsteam buys the industry-specific software small businesses already run on — association management, self-storage, field services, healthcare practice management, automotive, wine, hospitality — and embeds its own payment processing into those products. It registered as a Visa payment facilitator in 2019, and by its own account it now employs more than 2,100 people and serves over 60,000 customers, having acquired dozens of software businesses since 2018. For a merchant, that means Fullsteam is usually not a company you chose. It is the company that started processing your payments after the software vendor you did choose was acquired. The product side of that bargain is real: modern embedded payments, one support and reporting layer, and back-office scale a small software vendor could not fund. The commercial side is where the criticism sits. Fullsteam publishes no pricing at all, and a payments-audit firm has documented five rate increases since May 2023, most recently in April 2026.
Aeropay is a Chicago pay-by-bank company founded in 2017 by Daniel Muller, and it sells something genuinely different from the merchant accounts most of this site covers: it moves money directly between bank accounts over ACH and the instant rails rather than over the card networks. The business is built around four pieces — Aerosync for connecting a customer's bank account, Pay for taking the debit, Payout for pushing money back out, and Guard for risk — and it is sold to industries where cards are either expensive, awkward or refused outright. That history is the important context. Aeropay found its first real traction in cannabis dispensaries, where card acceptance is a persistent problem, and then moved hard into online gaming; by August 2024 gaming was around 80% of revenue. It raised a $20m Series B in May 2024, led by Group 11, and has assembled a credible list of banking and network partners since — Cross River, MVB Bank, Regent Bank, a Worldpay collaboration for gaming, a Skipify checkout partnership and a Jack Henry integration announced in June 2026. The company publishes no pricing at all, and its consumer-facing record is the problem: the Better Business Bureau rates it F, with a pattern-of-complaints alert and complaints about delayed transfers and unresponsive support.
Zip is the US buy-now-pay-later network formerly known as Quadpay, owned by the ASX-listed Zip Co Limited. Zip Co was founded in Sydney in 2013 by Larry Diamond and Peter Gray and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in 2015; the American business it now trades under is Quadpay, a New York company incorporated in August 2017 and bought by Zip in a deal announced in June 2020, approved by shareholders on 31 August 2020 and completed that September. For a merchant the offer is the familiar BNPL trade: let shoppers split a purchase into four instalments over six weeks, get paid up front, and hand the credit and non-payment risk to Zip. What separates Zip from the rest of the category is that it prints a price, and a settlement window to go with it. Its Standard plan is published on its own site at 5.9% plus 30 cents per transaction with no monthly or annual fee, where Afterpay, Klarna and most of the field quote nothing at all and negotiate every deal in private. It also publishes what most of the category will not: that it settles the merchant in full, minus its fees, within two to three business days, and where chargeback liability sits. That 5.9% is nonetheless the highest published headline rate in mainstream BNPL, and Zip's own FAQ confirms it is a floor rather than a ceiling. The parent is now solidly profitable — FY26, the year to 30 June 2026, brought A$16.7 billion of transaction volume, A$1.336 billion of revenue and A$116.4 million of statutory profit, with the US arm growing revenue more than 42% in local currency — but it has also exited Singapore, the United Kingdom and, in August 2026, New Zealand, and in May 2026 lost a unanimous High Court trade mark case in its home market — a loss it settled eight days later by acquiring the disputed mark from Firstmac, avoiding the rebrand the judgment otherwise required and taking on no further damages liability.
Sola is the brand Fidelity Payment Services and its Cardknox payment gateway have traded under since October 2024. The underlying business is old by payments standards — the Better Business Bureau records it as started on 1 December 1996, and Sola's own history says it began as a retail ISO agent for Heartland Payments before becoming a registered ISO with First Data in 2008, expanding into Canada in 2010, building the Cardknox gateway in 2013, being acquired by the private equity firm H.I.G. in 2017 and passing to PSG in a 2022 acquisition in which H.I.G. stayed on as a minority investor. It is headquartered at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the rebrand announcement described it as serving tens of thousands of merchants across a range of industries. What distinguishes it from the crowd of merchant-services resellers is that it owns its gateway rather than renting one: Cardknox is Sola's own product, which is why the company can go after software platforms wanting to embed payments as convincingly as it goes after individual merchants. What it has in common with the crowd is that it publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms anywhere on its site. Its own footer discloses what it is — a registered Independent Sales Organization of Citizens Bank, N.A. and Elavon, Inc. — which is the most useful sentence on the website.
PAR Technology Corporation is a New York Stock Exchange company founded in 1968 in New Hartford, New York, originally as a defense contractor, and now a restaurant-technology business that sold its Government segment to Booz Allen Hamilton in 2024 to concentrate on it. Its cloud point of sale began life outside the company as Brink Software, a San Diego business PAR partnered with from 2011 and acquired in September 2014; rebadged PAR POS, it runs in what the company says is more than 140,000 restaurant locations, including large franchise estates such as Burger King and Papa Johns, and around it PAR sells loyalty and engagement, digital ordering, back-office software, hardware and its own payments product, PAR Pay. The payments proposition is unusual for a point-of-sale vendor and is the most interesting thing here: PAR Pay is deliberately gateway-agnostic — its own marketing says to pick your processor, your hands are never tied — with next-day funding as standard, EMV, NFC and EBT support, tip handling, chargeback tooling, P2PE and PCI compliance and machine-learning fraud scoring across more than 110 transaction signals. The business behind it is growing: second-quarter 2026 revenue of $133.4 million, up 19% year on year, with annual recurring revenue of about $338.0 million, up more than 17%. What PAR does not do is publish a price for any of it.
Bolt Financial, Inc. is the one-click checkout company founded in San Francisco in 2014 by Ryan Breslow and Eric Feldman, which raised $355 million led by BlackRock in January 2022 at an $11 billion valuation. The product is a hosted checkout backed by a claimed network of more than 80 million US shoppers, the idea being that a returning Bolt account holder skips the form entirely, and the pricing is genuinely the most detailed and the most aggressive published in this market: a flat 2.5% plus 30 cents for processing, a $5 chargeback fee, 100% of fees returned on refunds, subscriptions and Checkout Everywhere free, and the statement that there are no lock-in commitments, ever. The problem is not the product sheet. It is the company. Bolt's valuation was reported as low as $300 million in 2024 secondary sales, down from $11 billion in January 2022; it has cut staff four times since 2022, most recently by roughly 30% in April 2026; it eliminated its entire human resources function; the founder left the chief executive role in 2022 and returned in March 2025; and trade reporting describes a company that has struggled to pay vendors. Two of its largest named customers sued it and settled. For a merchant, that is not background colour — the checkout is the least replaceable component in a store.
Basys Processing is a privately held merchant-services company in Lenexa, Kansas, incorporated in March 2002 and run by its founder, Brad Oddo. Its own footer describes what it is more precisely than its marketing does: a registered Independent Sales Organization of Citizens Bank, N.A., KeyBank, N.A., PNC Bank, N.A. and Merrick Bank. In practice that means Basys sells, prices and supports merchant accounts that settle on partner rails, deploying Fiserv-family and PAX hardware alongside its own IQ Pro gateway, and it reaches most of its merchants through banks, credit unions, software platforms and professional associations rather than through cold outbound. The pitch is service rather than price: US-based in-house support that answers 99% of calls within three rings and resolves 90% of issues on the first, next-day funding, surcharging and cash-discount programs, ACH, recurring billing, QuickBooks and ERP integrations, and a healthcare practice that reaches as far as Epic. The complaint record is remarkably quiet for a company of 24 years — an A+ Better Business Bureau rating, accredited since March 2014, with essentially no complaint volume on file. The gap is the one its own pricing page opens: it is headed 'Total Pricing Transparency' and contains no prices.
Talus Pay is a Dallas merchant-services organisation trading as FPT Operating Company, LLC. The business dates to 2006, when it was founded in Dallas as Future Payment Technologies; it took the Talus Pay name in February 2019 following a trademark dispute, and has since consolidated its acquisitions under the master brand Talus. Its Better Business Bureau file records a business start date of 2 December 2016 and accreditation since 10 April 2017 — dates that reflect the current LLC's registration rather than the origin of the business. It has been a portfolio company of the private-equity firm A&M Capital Partners since 2017 and has grown largely by acquisition: Prolific Business Solutions in 2018, three add-on deals during 2019, and Jobox.ai together with Clarus Merchant Services in January 2024. The corporate structure is unusually layered even by ISO standards — AMCP Payments Intermediate Company LLC does business as Talus Pay, Talus Payments, LTD Merchant Services, MSP Consulting, Granite Payment Alliance, Philadelphia Processing, City National Bank Merchant Services and Merchant Bank Partners, and the group is a registered ISO or MSP of Pinnacle Bank dba Synovus Bank, Citizens Bank N.A., Elavon and Esquire Bank. Talus sells a proprietary gateway called Talus Connect, the ReadyPoint point-of-sale line, mobile acceptance, and — through a partnership with Ingenico announced in December 2025 — a hardware-free SoftPOS tap-to-pay product for North America. It holds an A+ BBB rating. It publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms anywhere.
Compare processors on published facts — rates, fees, contract terms and support — with a grade that explains itself.
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