Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

Xsolla is a merchant of record built specifically for video games, founded in Perm, Russia in 2005 as 2Pay by Aleksandr Agapitov, renamed Xsolla in 2011 and headquartered in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles since the company moved to California in 2010. It becomes the legal seller of your game or in-game item, which transfers sales tax, VAT, fraud loss and chargeback liability off the developer and onto Xsolla, and it is the dominant option for direct-to-player web shops that route around the 30% mobile app store cut. Its marketing describes a revenue share as low as 5%, with over 1,000 payment methods across 200-plus markets, 130-plus currencies and 25-plus languages. It publishes no full rate card, and its recent corporate history — a 2021 mass dismissal driven by workforce analytics, six former-executive lawsuits since 2019, and a 2024 Bloomberg investigation into more than $100 million moving between company and founder accounts — deserves as much of a developer's attention as the pricing does.

Xsolla's marketing describes a revenue share "as low as 5%", and the only place it publishes an actual number is its Login product page, which states a 5% transaction fee for a custom interface. There is no published rate card for Pay Station or for the merchant-of-record service itself, and commercial terms are quoted per contract. Independent reviewers and developers report that the all-in cost typically lands between 7% and 10% once individual payment method costs, currency handling and optional modules are included. We could not corroborate that range from Xsolla itself and present it as reported rather than established — get the total effective rate for your own mix of markets and payment methods in writing before signing.

Contract-specific. Xsolla shows the next scheduled payout date in the publisher dashboard and states that the schedule follows the terms of the individual contract rather than a published standard. Payout methods are bank transfer and PayPal.

Expert grade B-Read review →

Moov

Moov Financial is a US payments platform for software companies, built by Wade Arnold and Bob Smith out of the open-source moov.io money-movement libraries Arnold began publishing in 2017. It sells one API that accepts cards and bank payments, holds balances in wallets, sends payouts by RTP, FedNow or push-to-card, and issues virtual cards — the full money-movement stack that a vertical SaaS company would otherwise assemble from four vendors. It is the rare payments company that publishes a complete rate card: interchange plus 0.60% and 15 cents for online card acceptance, interchange plus 0.50% and 15 cents for Tap to Pay, 25 cents for next-day ACH, and a $500 monthly minimum with no setup fee. It has raised roughly $77.5 million across three named rounds, with Visa, Andreessen Horowitz, Bain Capital Ventures and Commerce Ventures on the register, and it operates in the United States only.

Interchange plus 0.60% and 15 cents per online card transaction. International cards add 1.5%.

Moov's own send rails are part of the product rather than a settlement schedule: instant payouts run over RTP and FedNow or push-to-card at 0.95% (50-cent minimum, $5 cap), and standard bank payouts run over ACH at 25 cents next-day or 40 cents same-day.

Expert grade BRead review →

Ingenico

POS System

Ingenico is the French payment terminal manufacturer behind a large share of the card readers on the world's counters, founded in Suresnes in 1980 and today selling terminals, SoftPOS and its Ingenico 360 cloud platform through banks, acquirers and ISVs rather than direct to merchants. Its own site claims roughly 3,000 staff across 52 offices in 32 countries, deployments in more than 120 countries, tens of millions of terminals in the field, over 1,000 bank and acquirer clients and 2,500-plus payment applications. It publishes no merchant pricing, because merchants are not its customers. The story of 2026 is financial rather than technical: after Apollo bought it from Worldline in 2022, Ingenico opened talks with its lenders in April 2026 over an interest bill it could not carry, and in August 2026 announced a recapitalisation that converted part of its debt to equity, brought in EUR 150 million of new money from a PIMCO-led group and removed Apollo from the shareholder register entirely.

Ingenico does not process card transactions for merchants and publishes no merchant rates. It sells terminals, terminal software and platform services to banks, acquirers, merchant services providers and ISVs, who set the rate a merchant actually pays. If an Ingenico device is on your counter, the rate came from whoever put it there.

Expert grade B-Read review →

First Card Payments

High-Risk Specialist

First Card Payments is a high-risk merchant account provider operating from Brickell Avenue in Miami with a second office in Los Angeles, trading under the legal name Ellis Financial Holdings Corp with Alexander Ellis as president. It is a broker rather than a processor: it places accounts with what it describes as more than 30 banking and ISO partners, across 40-plus verticals that ordinary processors decline — adult, CBD, firearms, nutraceuticals, debt relief, travel, forex, gaming, dropshipping and pharmacy among them. It holds an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau without being accredited, and the BBB records the business as starting on 2 December 2015. It publishes no rates, no fees, no reserve terms and no contract terms anywhere on its site, and it appears in Fit Small Business's 2026 shortlist of high-risk providers as the pick for a one-stop account setup.

Pricing clarity: 1.0
Feature set: 3.0
Ease of use: 3.5

★ 5 bbbRead review →

BitPay

BitPay is a cryptocurrency payment processor founded in May 2011 by Tony Gallippi and Stephen Pair, now based in Alpharetta, Georgia, and by its own description the world's longest-operating crypto payments company. A merchant is quoted in fiat, the customer pays in bitcoin, a stablecoin or another supported asset, and BitPay settles to the merchant's bank account in dollars on the next business day, absorbing the price movement. Its merchant pricing is published in full — 2% + 25 cents under $500,000 a month, 1.5% + 25 cents to $999,999, and 1% + 25 cents above $1 million — which puts it ahead of most of the payments industry on transparency. Crypto payments are push transactions, so there are no chargebacks. The company holds a BBB A without accreditation, settled with the US Treasury's sanctions office in 2021 over 2,102 apparent violations, and carries a 1.2-star Trustpilot score driven overwhelmingly by consumers using its wallet rather than by merchants.

Published and tiered by monthly volume: 2% + 25 cents per transaction under $500,000 USD a month, 1.5% + 25 cents from $500,000 to $999,999, and 1% + 25 cents at $1 million and above. BitPay states that higher fees apply to high-risk industries, without publishing what those are. The fee is assessed per paid invoice, and there is no cap on monthly transaction count.

Settlement runs automatically every business day. BitPay collects the previous business day's processed payments and sends them to the merchant's bank account or crypto wallet according to the chosen settlement preference. Once a settlement is issued, BitPay states funds appear in the bank account after two business days.

★ 4 bbbRead review →

Trustly

Trustly is a Swedish open-banking payments company, launched in Stockholm in 2008, that moves money directly from a shopper's bank account to a merchant's — bypassing the card networks entirely. It is the largest pay-by-bank provider in the world by volume: its full year 2025 results report processed volume up 17.6% to SEK 1,059.0 billion, the first year it has carried more than $100 billion in total payment value, and it passed 120 million users in April 2026. Revenue, however, fell 12% on a constant-currency basis to SEK 2,427.7 million and it made a SEK 565.0 million loss after tax, a year into a 24-month transformation programme. It is regulated in Sweden and the UK, and in February 2022 the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority issued it a warning and a SEK 130 million fine for serious anti-money-laundering failings. It publishes no merchant pricing.

Trustly publishes no merchant rates in any market. Its US material argues the case for pay by bank against card costs without quoting its own price, and its guarantee documentation directs merchants to a sales representative or merchant success manager for pricing. Third-party sources describe European pricing around 1.5% of transaction value with a minimum per-transaction charge, but we could not corroborate that for the United States and would not rely on it. Expect an enterprise quote priced by volume, sector and how much guarantee cover you take.

Not published as a standard. Trustly's guarantee products are sold partly on the basis of quick cash flow, which indicates settlement timing is tied to which guarantee tier a merchant buys rather than being one published figure. Establish the settlement timetable and the guarantee tier together, because they are the same commercial decision.

★ 2.8 trustpilotRead review →

Spreedly

Payment Gateway

Spreedly is a payment orchestration platform and PCI-compliant card vault founded in 2007 and run from Durham, North Carolina. It does not process payments itself. It stores your customers' card credentials in its own vault, connects them to more than 140 payment gateways through one API, and routes, retries and optimises transactions across them. It reported annual gross merchandise volume expected to exceed $60 billion for 2025, up from $50 billion in 2024, across more than 400 customers in 100-plus countries. Entry pricing for the vault starts at $750 a month; everything above that is quoted. It is enterprise infrastructure, not a merchant account, and a small business should not be shopping for it.

Pricing clarity: 2.5
Feature set: 4.5
Ease of use: 3.5

Expert grade BRead review →

Klarna

Klarna is a Swedish-founded, UK-parented digital bank and flexible payments provider that listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2025. Its full year 2025 results put it at $127.9 billion of gross merchandise volume, $3.5 billion of revenue, 118 million active consumers and 966,000 merchants. For a retailer it is not a merchant account — it is an additional payment method that sits alongside card acceptance, sold on the promise of higher conversion and larger baskets, and priced far above card interchange. Klarna publishes no US rate card, its dispute process runs on its own rules rather than the card networks', and it is defending a securities class action filed after its IPO.

Klarna publishes no US rate card. Third-party reviewers and merchant reports consistently describe a standard US rate of about 5.99% plus $0.30 per transaction for its pay-later products, with long-term financing quoted lower because Klarna earns interest from the shopper, and negotiated rates for large merchants. Treat those figures as reported rather than published — Klarna's own documentation says only that a fixed fee and a percentage fee are charged per capture, with the actual numbers shown in the merchant portal under each product's Rates tab.

Set per contract. Klarna's documentation describes a payout schedule plus a deliberate payout delay that acts as a buffer against returns — its own worked example is weekly Wednesday payouts with a one-week delay, so an order captured on a Friday settles the Wednesday of the following week. Settlement reports arrive the day after the payout is processed. Check both the schedule and the delay in your contract, because the delay is the number that determines your working capital.

★ 4.5 trustpilotRead review →

Inovio Payments

Payment Gateway

Inovio is a payment gateway aimed squarely at specialty and high-risk verticals — adult, firearms, e-cigarettes and vape, online gaming, online alcohol, credit repair, CBD, telemedicine, online pharmacy and nutraceuticals — alongside ordinary retail and SaaS. It is a wholly owned brand of North, the company formerly called North American Bancard, which launched it in April 2016, and it is a registered ISO of BMO Harris Bank. Its own site says 'Since 1992', a date that belongs to its parent group and to its sister brand Humboldt Merchant Services rather than to Inovio. It publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms, and it has no Better Business Bureau profile of its own.