Payment Processing · Buyer guide
There is a line on a lot of merchant statements that has nothing to do with interchange, nothing to do with your processor's margin, and nothing to do with how much you sold. It is the gateway fee: a flat monthly charge, a few cents a transaction, and sometimes a few cents a day for closing the batch. On a business doing 400 card-not-present transactions a month it comes to about $67 a month, or roughly $805 a year, before a single percentage point of processing has been counted.
That figure comes from the only large gateway in the United States that publishes a complete price list. Of the gateways this site has reviewed, one posts every fee it charges on a public page. Four post nothing. One posts a starting price that begins at $750 a month. Here is what each of them actually says, what the arithmetic looks like, and when you should not be paying a gateway fee at all.
A payment gateway is the piece of software that takes a card number from your checkout page, terminal or invoice and hands it to a processor in the format the card networks expect. It also stores the card on file, retries failed subscriptions, screens for fraud and keeps your systems out of scope for most of PCI. It is a real product. The question is whether you are paying for it separately.
You are usually paying separately when you have a traditional merchant account — an ISO or an acquiring bank underwrote you individually, and the gateway is a second vendor bolted on. You are usually not paying separately when you are on a payment facilitator's flat rate, because the gateway is built in and the price is inside the percentage.
That distinction explains the whole market. The gateways with published prices are the ones that sell to merchants directly. The gateways with no published prices are the ones that sell to resellers, who set the merchant's price themselves.
Authorize.net (our grade: A-) posts a full fee schedule on its sign-up page, and it is worth reading because almost nobody else in this category will show you one. Read on 22 September 2026, the plans are:
Setup is $0 on every plan, and so is the card chargeback fee, the monthly minimum and the gateway's own discount rate. Authorize.net states flatly that the gateway "does not have a contract or early termination fees". One detail is worth pulling out of the fee table: the 10-cent transaction fee is charged on "charges, refunds, voids and declines". You pay it on a transaction that never becomes a sale. The extras it does charge are listed too: 25 cents per Account Updater refresh, $25 for a returned payment, $20 for a late payment, $25 for an eCheck chargeback and $3 for a returned eCheck item.
Nothing here is cheap or expensive in the abstract. What matters is that you can price it before you sign, which is more than the rest of this list allows.
NMI (B-) runs one of the most widely deployed gateways in the country and does not publish a merchant price anywhere. Its own FAQ explains why, and it is unusually candid, because the FAQ is not written for merchants at all — it is written for the partners who resell it. Asked whether a partner can end up in a negative residual position, it answers: "It's possible if you set merchant fees below your buy rate," and advises confirming costs "against your partner schedule". Another describes a "monthly platform minimum" calculated on "gateway revenue generated from your merchant portfolio".
In other words, NMI sells a wholesale price to an ISO, and the ISO decides what you pay. The gateway line on your statement is that ISO's retail markup, and it is negotiable in a way a published price is not.
PayTrace (B) has no pricing page at all. As of 22 September 2026 its site carries no pricing link in the navigation and the URL for one returns a 404. It is sold through resellers on the same model, and it is popular with B2B merchants specifically because of its Level II and Level III data handling — the company says it settled $46 billion in 2023 and that more than half of that volume received Level II and III discounts. Whether the gateway fee is $15 or $75 a month depends entirely on who sold it to you.
Cybersource (B) has been a wholly owned Visa subsidiary since 2010 and brands itself "Cybersource, A Visa Solution". Its small-business page carries no rate, no monthly fee and no per-transaction price anywhere on it.
Akurateco (B+) is a white-label gateway sold to PSPs rather than to shops, and it says so plainly in its FAQ: "Fees and costs are discussed with each client individually and are based on a number of transactions, the type of product they select, and an integration type of their choice." Third-party listings quote setup and monthly figures for it; we found none of them corroborated by Akurateco itself, so treat them as unverified.
Spreedly (B) is the one that at least posts a floor. Its Independent Vault product is listed at "Starting at $750 per month" for PCI-compliant card storage; the Performance Optimization tier, which adds network tokenization, account updater, retries and routing, is "Contact Sales". That is enterprise pricing honestly labelled, and it tells a small merchant immediately that this is not their product.
The flat-rate platforms fold the gateway into the percentage. Stripe (A) charges 2.9% + 30 cents on a domestic card online and 2.7% + 5 cents in person, and states outright that it "does not charge setup fees, monthly fees, or any other hidden fees like closure fees". PayPal's enterprise arm, Braintree (A-), lists 2.89% + $0.29 for cards and third-party wallets with no monthly, setup or gateway line.
Helcim (A-) is the interesting case, because it sells interchange-plus — the pricing model that normally comes with a separate gateway bill — and charges nothing for the gateway anyway. Its pricing page lists signup fees at $0, PCI fees at $0, "No account monthly fees" and "No minimums, software fees, or statement fees", with rates starting at interchange + 0.40% + 8 cents in person and interchange + 0.50% + 25 cents online.
So the honest framing is not "gateways cost money". It is that a gateway fee is a feature of the traditional merchant-account model, and there are interchange-plus processors that do not charge one.
Take a business running 400 card-not-present transactions a month at an average ticket of $120 — $48,000 a month of volume. On Authorize.net's Gateway Only plan, batching once each business day:
As a share of volume that is 0.14%, or 14 basis points. Set that against Helcim's published interchange-plus margin, which starts at 0.40% in person and 0.50% online, and the gateway line is adding roughly a third again on top of what a transparent processor charges for its entire service. It is not a rounding error.
The same fee lands much harder on a smaller merchant, because $25 of it does not move. At 100 transactions a month the bill is $37.10, which is 37 cents a transaction. On a $50 ticket that is 0.74% — more than most processors' entire markup, paid to a different company, for software.
This is also why the per-transaction component matters more than the monthly one as you grow, and why the batch fee, which looks trivial, is the only line that does not scale with anything you control.
And check whether you need the separate gateway at all. If you are a straightforward card-present or card-not-present business without an unusual integration, a processor that includes the gateway removes the line entirely. If you are a B2B merchant relying on Level III data, or a platform routing to several acquirers, the gateway is doing real work and the fee is the price of it — but you should still know the number.
