Payment Technology · Buyer guide
If you run a software company that serves a vertical — property management, field service, dental practices, gyms, schools — you have been told, probably by several investors and at least one conference speaker, that you should be earning on your customers' payments. The advice is right. The question it skips is how, and the answer to that decides who holds your customers' merchant agreements, who is liable when one of them goes bad, and how much of the margin you keep.
There are three routes. A referral deal, where you hand customers to a processor and collect a residual. A payfac-as-a-service arrangement, where you board and price your customers on someone else's registration. And registering as a payment facilitator yourself. This article sets out what each one is, what the card network rules require of it, and what the providers who publish prices — an unusually short list — actually charge, as of September 2026.
The oldest arrangement, and the one most vertical software companies start with. You integrate a processor's gateway, refer your customers to it, and the processor pays you a share of what it earns on them — a residual — for as long as they process. The merchant agreement is between your customer and the processor. Underwriting, risk, settlement and support are the processor's problem. You have a line of revenue and no new obligations.
The price of that simplicity is control. The processor sets the rate, or a sales agent does, and the residual is a fraction of a margin you do not see. Payroc is a reasonable picture of how this market works: a large acquirer that sells almost entirely through agents and referral partners, runs its own gateway and boarding APIs, and publishes no price, because the price is whatever the partner who signed the merchant negotiated. Fortis sells to ERP and business-software platforms on the same basis — the platform earns a share of the processing revenue — and its review notes that the rate a merchant sees is often set in part by the software vendor. Neither publishes a residual schedule, and you should not expect one; it is negotiated per partner.
A referral deal is the right answer when payments are incidental to your product, your customers are small, and you do not want a risk function. It is the wrong answer once payments are a material share of your revenue, because you are then building a business on a margin someone else controls. The extreme form of that is Fullsteam, which does not partner with vertical software companies so much as buy them — dozens since 2018 — and embed its own processing into the acquired products. For the software founder it is an exit; for the merchant it means the processor changed without their choosing it.
The middle route, and the one with the most competition. A registered payment facilitator lends you its registration, its sponsor bank, its underwriting and its settlement rails. You board your customers as sub-merchants under it, usually through an API inside your own onboarding flow, and you set the price they pay. The provider charges you a buy rate, a share of the spread, a subscription, or a combination. The economics look like being a payfac. The registration, and most of the compliance burden, stays with the provider.
Because this is a market that sells to software companies, more of it publishes prices than the merchant-acquiring market does. The published models fall into three shapes.
Tilled, which claims to have coined the term PayFac-as-a-Service, publishes two plans: Start-Up at $500 a month with a 70% revenue share, positioned for platforms processing under $5 million a month, and Scaling at $2,500 a month with an 80% share, for platforms above it. Its own revenue calculator assumes the merchant pays 2.9% plus $0.30 and that all-in partner cost is 2.27% plus $0.15 — which makes the spread 0.63% plus $0.15 a transaction before the share is applied. Those are Tilled's illustrative assumptions, not a quote; your buy rate depends on your volume and mix.
Rainforest publishes its entire rate card and takes no revenue share: interchange and dues at pass-through plus 0.30% and $0.30 a transaction at the entry tier, 0.25% and $0.25 above $5 million a month or 50,000 monthly transactions, and 0.20% and $0.20 above $15 million or 150,000. The tiers are pick-a-tier, so all volume bills at the single tier reached. Disputes are $15, ACH and standard payouts are $0.20 an item, and Rainforest states it charges no PCI fees. Whatever you charge your merchants above that is yours.
Finix prices its platform product the same way: 0.30% plus $0.15 per card transaction, with Finix stating it adds no markup on interchange. The per-merchant lines are the ones to model: $5.00 to onboard each sub-merchant, $2.50 a month for each active one, and $30.00 per dispute, including chargeback inquiries. ACH is 1.00%, capped at $10, plus $0.25.
Moov publishes interchange plus 0.60% and 15 cents for online card acceptance and interchange plus 0.50% and 15 cents for Tap to Pay, with international cards adding 1.5%, against a $500 monthly minimum and no setup fee. Its distinction is the rest of the stack — wallets at 50 cents a month per active wallet, next-day ACH at 25 cents, instant payouts over RTP or push-to-card at 0.95% with a $5 cap — which is the full money-movement set a platform would otherwise buy from several vendors.
Stripe Connect is the largest of these by a distance, and its pricing turns on one choice. If Stripe handles pricing, your connected accounts pay Stripe's standard rates and the platform pays nothing for Connect itself; Stripe's documentation describes accounts with full Stripe Dashboard access as relying on Stripe to manage onboarding, reporting and loss liability. If the platform handles pricing, you set your own processing rates for connected accounts and collect fees on each transaction — and you pay $2 per monthly active account, an account being active in any month a payout is sent to it, plus 0.25% and 25 cents per payout. Cross-border payouts start at 0.25% of volume and instant payouts are 1%. Adyen for Platforms is the enterprise alternative on the same shape, with pricing that is not published.
Take a platform whose customers process $10 million a year at a $100 average ticket, which is 100,000 transactions. Use Tilled's published assumptions, because they are the only published pair: merchants pay 2.9% plus $0.30, all-in cost is 2.27% plus $0.15. The spread is 0.63% of $10 million, or $63,000, plus $0.15 on 100,000 transactions, or $15,000 — $78,000 a year.
None of those is the right answer in general. The point is that the models are priced on different units — a share of spread, basis points and cents over interchange, or active accounts and payouts — and a platform has to run its own numbers on its own ticket size, its own payout cadence and its own merchant count before the headline percentages mean anything.
The full version. You contract with an acquiring bank as a payment facilitator, and your customers become your sponsored merchants. Visa's Core Rules, in the edition effective 18 April 2026, describe what that involves. The acquirer must register you with Visa, including an attestation that it has done its due diligence, and obtain a unique payment facilitator identifier that you assign to every transaction alongside an identifier for each sponsored merchant. If you are considered high-integrity risk, you must be registered as a high-integrity-risk payment facilitator. The acquirer is liable for everything you and your sponsored merchants do — the rules put it as the acts of a sponsored merchant being treated as those of the facilitator, and those of the facilitator as those of the acquirer. Which is why the sponsor bank underwrites you as carefully as it would a large merchant, and why it will want reserves, financials and a risk team it can point to.
The rule that surprises most software companies is 5.3.1.4. An acquirer that contracts with a payment facilitator must enter into a direct merchant agreement with any sponsored merchant that exceeds USD 1 million in annual transaction volume — before processing for a merchant new to the facilitator, or within two years of crossing the threshold for an existing one. You can keep providing the payment services, including settlement, but your largest customers end up with a contract with the bank as well as with you. The current edition of the rule, last updated in October 2025, carries two exceptions: the acquirer need not sign directly where the facilitator has held the relationship for at least two years with the same acquirer, reports volume, disputes and fraud to it, and remains under its oversight; or where the merchant is in one of ten listed categories, including utilities, rental real estate, physicians, hospitals, nursing facilities, schools and universities. Mastercard raised its own threshold from $100,000 to $1 million in 2014, according to Digital Transactions' reporting of the bulletin at the time; its current rules are not public.
The cost of registration is not published by either network, and estimates of the all-in cost of standing up a payfac vary enough between consultancies that we will not repeat one. What can be said is that it is a fixed cost — staff, sponsor-bank requirements, compliance — against a variable benefit, and that every payfac-as-a-service provider above exists because the crossover point is high. Providers like Payabli, which discloses that it is a registered payment facilitator of PNC Bank and Huntington Bank, are selling exactly the registration you would otherwise have to obtain.
The referral residual is real money for a company with a small customer base and no appetite for risk. The payfac-as-a-service market is where most vertical software companies with real volume should be looking, and it is one of the few corners of payments where several providers have put a price in public, which makes it possible to compare them honestly. Registration is for the platform whose payments revenue is large enough to fund a risk function and whose customers are worth contracting with directly. Choose by the merchant agreement and the liability, and let the margin follow.
