Every processor.
Graded on evidence.

Verotel

Merchant of Record

C+

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

Merchant of Record

C+

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 (Bill.com)

Bank / A2A Payments

B

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

Platform / Acquirer

B-

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

Merchant of Record

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

Paystone

ISO

B

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.

ProMerchant

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

ProMerchant is a small merchant-services company in Woburn, Massachusetts, started in May 2018, that sells card acceptance to US restaurants, retailers, mobile traders, phone-order and e-commerce businesses, and places harder-to-approve merchants — CBD, vape, supplements, firearms, credit repair, telemarketing and dozens of others on its published list — with what it says are twelve different high-risk processors. Its pitch is the terms rather than the rate: month-to-month agreements with no early-termination fee, no setup or application fee, a free terminal placement programme, and a choice between interchange-plus pricing with a fixed markup and a zero-cost surcharge plan for retail and restaurant merchants. It publishes no numbers; third-party reviewers report quotes starting around interchange plus 0.50% and $0.15 per transaction and $0.30 per virtual-terminal transaction. Funding is next day for batches settled by 8:30pm Eastern and otherwise two business days. It holds an A+ from the Better Business Bureau, accredited since November 2018 with seven complaints in three years, and a 4.3 on Trustpilot from 258 reviews — though only a couple of those are from the last year, and a run of mid-2024 reviews describe months of unanswered calls that ProMerchant attributed to a restructuring at a parent company unrelated to payments. With about 15 staff and no disclosed sponsor bank or processor, it is an agent office: your contract, reserve and funding terms come from whichever processor it places you with.

Gumroad

Merchant of Record

C+

Gumroad is a storefront and checkout for people selling digital products — e-books, courses, software, memberships, design assets — founded in San Francisco in 2011 by Sahil Lavingia and, since 1 January 2025, the merchant of record on every sale, which means it charges, collects and remits sales tax, VAT and GST worldwide and handles disputes with buyers. It says creators have earned more than $1 billion through it, and in April 2025 it published its entire codebase under an MIT licence. Lavingia stepped down as chief executive in November 2025 after 14 years, handing over to long-time engineer Ershad Kunnakkadan. The price of the simplicity is high: 10% plus $0.50 on every direct sale, plus card processing at 2.9% plus $0.30, and a flat 30% on sales that come through Gumroad's Discover marketplace; only sellers passing $20,000 in a calendar month drop to 5% plus $0.50. There is no monthly fee, refunds return Gumroad's share, and chargebacks cost the creator the sale and the processing fee but no penalty. Payouts are weekly on a fixed weekday by country, after a seven-day hold, and — since a change creators noticed in March 2026 — only once the balance reaches $100. Public reviews are poor: the Trustpilot profile scores 1.4 from about 415 reviews, most of them about held or missing payouts and support that is hard to reach.

Pricing clarity

4.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.5

Barclaycard Payments

Platform / Acquirer

B-

Barclaycard Payments is the merchant-acquiring arm of Barclays Bank PLC, the business that has signed UK shops up to take cards since Barclaycard launched the country's first credit card on 29 June 1966 and installed the UK's first electronic point-of-sale terminal in 1986. It is one of the largest acquirers in the UK — the company says it processed more than nine billion card payments in 2025 for more than 160,000 businesses, settling in 18 currencies and accepting 118 — and it is in the middle of the biggest change in its history: in April 2025 Barclays agreed a partnership under which Brookfield Asset Management will help run the business as a standalone company, Barclays will put in about £400 million, and Brookfield can buy a majority stake from year three. A new chief executive, Jason Lalor, formerly of Mastercard, Conferma and Square, started in January 2026. For merchants the offer splits in two. Small businesses get Smartpay Anywhere, a £29 + VAT pocket reader with no contract and no monthly fee, or Smartpay Touch, a £29 + VAT-a-month Android terminal on a 12-month term with no exit fee; both settle next working day for sales taken before 7pm. Traditional countertop and portable terminals come on 18-month contracts at £16 or £18 + VAT a month after a free first year, with an exit fee if you leave early. Barclaycard publishes no rate card — every account is priced on turnover, with representative examples of 0.7% + 3p on an in-person debit card and 2.05% + 3p on a keyed credit card — and its service reputation is the weak point: the only Trustpilot profile blends consumer-card and merchant reviews and is dominated by complaints about reaching a person.