Payment Processor Reviews

Yoco

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Yoco is a Cape Town payments company that sells card machines, a free point-of-sale app and online payment tools to small and independent businesses in South Africa, and only in South Africa: its terms refuse businesses registered elsewhere and limit processing to sales made in the country, in rand. A merchant signs Yoco's own agreement rather than applying to a bank for a merchant account, with Absa and Citibank named in the terms as examples of the banking partners behind the payment service, which is why sign-up takes minutes and why Yoco, not a bank, decides when to pause a payout. As of September 2026 there are three plans. Core costs nothing a month and charges 2.30% excluding VAT on local cards in person, dropping to 1.35% on debit cards once the rolling three-month average of monthly sales reaches R50,000. Plus (R249 a month per location) and Pro (R499) lower those rates and add loyalty, multi-location, table management and accounting integrations. Online payments cost more: 2.95% + R2 excluding VAT on local cards on Core. Hardware is bought outright, with no rental: the Khumo 2 card machine was R699 on promotion. Standard payouts are free and, on Yoco's own schedule, reach the bank two to three business days after the sale, and faster payouts cost extra except on Pro. Yoco said in May 2026 that it serves more than 200,000 merchants; its newer card-machine page claims 250,000+ businesses. Its public review record is mixed: 3.7 out of 5 across 356 HelloPeter reviews in the past year, with praise for named support staff and complaints about account reviews, held payouts and chatbot-first support.

GlossGenius

POS & Business Software

B

GlossGenius is booking, point-of-sale, marketing and staff software for US salons, barbers, spas, medical spas and wellness and fitness studios, built in New York by twin sisters Danielle Cohen-Shohet, the chief executive, and Leah Cohen-Shohet. The company was incorporated in August 2015, raised a $44 million Series D at a $1.15 billion valuation in July 2026 and at the same time renamed itself Genius AI, with GlossGenius kept as its main product; it says more than 125,000 businesses use the platform. Card processing is built in and runs on Stripe: GlossGenius is the platform, Stripe is the processor, and every business gets a Stripe connected account rather than its own merchant ID. The published price is one flat 2.6% with no per-transaction fee, and it is the same whether the card is tapped, keyed, stored on file or used to pay a deposit online, which is unusual among salon platforms. Invoices cost 2.9% + $0.30 and buy-now-pay-later 6% + $0.30. A setting lets the business pass some or all of the fee to clients as a 2.5% or 3.5% convenience fee. The software costs $24, $48 or $148 a month billed annually ($28, $56 or $168 billed monthly), is month to month, and standard payouts are free, sent each evening Sunday to Thursday, and usually arrive the next day. The weak spots are the service record: a D- BBB rating for failing to respond to 24 complaints, and recent complaints from businesses whose payouts were held for verification.

Clip

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Clip is a Mexico City payments company founded in 2012 by Adolfo Babatz, still its chief executive, which processed its first transaction in 2013 and now serves what it calls hundreds of thousands of Mexican businesses with card readers, countertop terminals, Tap to Pay on Android and iPhone, payment links, an online checkout and a free business account. It is independent and privately held: it became a unicorn in June 2021 on a US$250 million round led by the SoftBank Latin America Fund and Viking Global, at a valuation Clip put at nearly US$2 billion; raised US$100 million from funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value and a West Coast mutual fund manager in June 2024; and in June 2026 was reported by Bloomberg Línea to have secured US$500 million from unnamed investors at a valuation above US$2.5 billion, in a round still subject to regulatory approval, as it launched a consumer wallet, Mi Clip, built with Ant International, Mastercard and TelevisaUnivision. The model is an aggregator's: the merchant signs Clip's own online terms, with the service provided either by PayClip, S. de R.L. de C.V. as aggregator or by Payclip Servicios de Adquirencia, S.A. de C.V. as acquirer, at Clip's discretion. As of September 2026 the standard commission is 3.6% + IVA per transaction, and a loyalty program cuts it to between 2.99% + MX$1 + IVA and 2.49% + IVA for merchants selling at least MX$10,000 a month by card, with Amex and international cards at 3.50%. There is no monthly fee and no fixed term, readers sell for as little as MX$129 on promotion, and card-present sales land instantly in a Clip Cuenta or within 24 hours in a bank account. The costs sit elsewhere: steep meses-sin-intereses surcharges, and terms that let Clip hold funds, suspend service or end the relationship without notice.

Xendit

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Xendit is a Jakarta-based payments company founded in 2015 by Moses Lo, Tessa Wijaya, Bo Chen and Juan Gonzalez, which went through Y Combinator's Summer 2015 batch as a peer-to-peer payments app and pivoted to payment gateway products in 2016. It now operates in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and Hong Kong, and publishes a Mexican rate card as well. A merchant signs Xendit's own services agreement and is paid out of a Xendit balance, under licences held by group companies in each market — a Bank Indonesia payment gateway licence, a Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas operator-of-payment-system registration, a Bank Negara Malaysia merchant-acquiring licence through Payex, a Bank of Thailand payment service provider licence, and others. Xendit publishes one regional rate card with every method's price, which is its real strength: as of September 2026, domestic cards are 2.9% + IDR 2,000 in Indonesia, 3.5% in the Philippines, 1.9% to 2.0% in Malaysia and 3.2% + THB 10 in Thailand, QRIS is 0.7%, and Indonesian virtual accounts are a flat IDR 9,000. The catch is a pricing overhaul. From 1 October 2026 Xendit adds a fixed processing fee to every transaction attempt — IDR 4,000, PHP 11, MYR 0.90 or THB 7, including failed attempts and refunds — plus a US$25 card chargeback fee, a US$50 monthly minimum for low-volume and dormant accounts and a US$250 monthly charge for merchants still on its legacy API. On small tickets the fixed fee can exceed the percentage. Card settlement is five business days in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. Xendit says it serves more than 15,200 businesses; its most recent widely reported round was a US$300 million Series D in May 2022, at an undisclosed valuation.

Qualpay

ISO

B-

Qualpay is a San Mateo, California payments company that sells a merchant account and its own payment gateway as a single product, so one account covers online checkout, a virtual terminal, recurring billing, invoicing and text-to-pay, ACH and in-person terminals, with one set of reports running from authorisation to deposit. It was incorporated in October 2013, launched its platform in 2014 and was founded by payments-industry veterans, and its leadership team comes largely from BA Merchant Services and Merchant e-Solutions; Craig Gass has been chief executive since at least 2015. It is a registered ISO of its sponsor bank, which is now Pinnacle Bank, a Tennessee bank, doing business as Synovus Bank: Synovus took a 60% stake and three of five board seats on 1 June 2023, Synovus combined with Pinnacle Financial Partners on 1 January 2026, and Synovus Bank merged into Pinnacle Bank the next day; Pinnacle's filings still list the 60% holding as of March 2026. The merchant agreement is signed by Qualpay, the bank and the merchant, and runs for three years with an early-termination fee equal to your average monthly Qualpay fees multiplied by the months left, with a $150 minimum. Qualpay publishes no rates at all as of September 2026; pricing is quoted after a free statement audit it calls the Savings Challenge. Qualpay says card payments take two to three days to fund. In recent years Qualpay has concentrated on propane and heating-oil dealers, waste haulers, utilities, nonprofits and B2B sellers, and it says its energy-sector volume passed $1 billion in the first quarter of 2025. The main blemish on its record is a 2020 Federal Trade Commission settlement over payment processing for the MOBE business-coaching scheme, which permanently bars it from processing for business-coaching and money-making-method sellers, permanently requires it to screen and monitor its riskier card-not-present clients, and imposes 15 years of compliance reporting and recordkeeping.

EBANX

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

EBANX is a cross-border payments company founded in Curitiba, Brazil in 2012 by Alphonse Voigt, Wagner Ruiz and João Del Valle, built to let companies outside Latin America sell to Brazilian shoppers in reais through local methods such as boleto and, later, Pix. It now says it covers more than 20 emerging markets across Latin America, Africa and Asia with more than 200 payment methods, serves more than 500 merchants — Spotify, Uber, AliExpress, Microsoft and Booking.com among the names on its site — and grew total payment volume 48% in 2025, with 65% of gross profit earned outside Brazil. It became a unicorn after a 2019 round from FTV Capital and Endeavor Catalyst, took a $400 million investment from Advent International in June 2021, plus a $30 million commitment to a planned US listing, and postponed that IPO in February 2022; it remains private. The model is an aggregator's: a foreign merchant signs a single agreement with EBANX's Singapore entity, EBANX group companies collect from shoppers locally, handle the currency exchange and taxes such as Brazil's IOF, and wire the net proceeds abroad in US dollars or euros — no local entity needed. Pricing is negotiated and unpublished. The published standard terms are merchant-unfriendly by default: a three-year term, an 80% exclusivity commitment, a fixed 4% reserve on every settlement for the first 180 days, funds available seven days after payment, and a $15 chargeback fee. On the shopper side, EBANX's Reclame Aqui page is rated 'Not recommended', with 2,683 complaints between March and August 2026 and none answered there. In 2020 it settled a Brazilian central bank case over a discontinued consumer foreign-currency account by paying R$880,000 under a commitment term.

Paystack

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Paystack is a payment aggregator for businesses in Africa, founded in Lagos in 2015 by Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, put through Y Combinator in early 2016 and bought by Stripe in October 2020 in a deal widely reported at over $200 million. Its own help desk says the service is available to businesses registered in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Kenya, with Côte d'Ivoire — which has a published rate card — described as a private beta alongside Egypt. Paystack's site says more than 200,000 businesses use it; its chief executive put the figure at 300,000 in January 2026. A merchant signs up with Paystack rather than applying for a merchant account of their own, which is the reason onboarding is quick and the reason Paystack, not an acquiring bank, decides when to hold funds. Pricing is published in full for every market, which is unusual in this segment: Nigeria is 1.5% + ₦100 on local transactions with the ₦100 waived under ₦2,500 and the whole fee capped at ₦2,000, 3.9% + ₦100 on international cards; South Africa is 2.9% + R1 excluding VAT locally and 3.1% + R1 internationally; Ghana is a flat 1.95%; Kenya is 1.5% on M-PESA and 2.9% on local cards; Côte d'Ivoire is 1.95% on mobile money and 3.2% on local cards. Settlement is next working day in Nigeria and Ghana and two working days in South Africa, with no setup or monthly charge. In January 2026 the business reorganised under a holding company, The Stack Group, whose founding shareholders are Stripe, Paystack's employees and Akinlade, alongside the Zap transfer app and a microfinance bank. The reservations are the ones that come with any aggregator: the Central Bank of Nigeria fined Paystack ₦250 million in April 2025 over Zap operating outside its licence, and the public review record is dominated by accounts of balances held during compliance review.

Mindbody

POS & Business Software

C+

Mindbody is booking, scheduling and point-of-sale software for fitness studios, gyms, salons and spas, founded in San Luis Obispo, California in 2001 and now the best-known brand in wellness software. Payment processing is sold as Mindbody Payments, built on Stripe Connect, and takes cards, ACH, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Klarna and Tap to Pay in more than forty countries. The pricing picture is unusually lopsided: Mindbody's own support documentation publishes card-present and card-not-present rates for around twenty regions — Canada at 2.89% + $0.25 CAD online and 2.39% + $0.10 CAD in person, the UK at 2.19% + 20p and 1.99% + 10p, most of the EU at 2.4% + €0.25 — and for the United States and Australia prints an email address instead. Software runs from $79 a month per location on the Starter plan, with the Accelerate and Ultimate tiers quoted rather than listed. Bookings that come through the consumer Mindbody app via its marketing tools are charged 3.5% plus a 20% marketplace fee, capped at $30 and applied only to a new client's first purchase. The terms of service, updated 20 March 2026, make early exit expensive: fees are non-refundable, thirty days' notice is required, and a customer who leaves before the end of a subscription term remains liable for the rest of it. The corporate context changed twice recently — the brands were gathered under a parent called Playlist in June 2025, and that business completed a merger with the German connected-fitness company EGYM in March 2026 at a combined valuation of $7.5 billion.

Mangopay

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Mangopay is payment infrastructure for marketplaces and platforms rather than a processor a shop signs up with. It launched in 2013 as a spin-off of the French group-gifting site Leetchi, was bought by Crédit Mutuel Arkéa in 2015, and has been majority-owned by Advent International since April 2022, which put €75 million of new capital in at the same time; Sergi Herrero, previously global director for payments and commerce partnerships at Meta, has been chief executive since September 2024. Mangopay S.A. is registered in Luxembourg and licensed by the CSSF as an electronic money institution, which is the core of the product: it can open an e-wallet for every buyer and seller on a platform, hold funds there, split a payment between several parties, and pay out later — the money movement a marketplace legally cannot do itself without a licence of its own. Its UK arm, Mangopay U.K. Limited, has been an FCA-authorised electronic money institution since 2023, under firm reference 984753. The company says it has created 207 million wallets and processed €68 billion in transactions, and its named clients are the big European marketplaces: Vinted, Wallapop, Chrono24, Rakuten France, ManoMano, Malt, Mirakl. It bought the Polish anti-fraud firm Nethone in November 2022 and the Dublin payment orchestrator WhenThen in March 2023, and now sells fraud screening, identity verification, FX across twenty-plus wallet currencies, payouts in thirty-plus countries and virtual IBANs alongside the core wallet. What it does not do is publish prices: pricing is custom and volume-based, quoted per platform, with no self-serve tier and no public rate card.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

Venmo (Business Profiles)

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

A Venmo business profile lets a sole proprietor, club or registered business accept payments from Venmo's 67 million monthly users inside the app — by username, QR code, or, since March 2024, Tap to Pay on a phone — and it is the only Venmo product that a merchant signs up for directly rather than through PayPal or Braintree. Venmo was founded in New York in 2009 by Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail, bought by Braintree in 2012 and by PayPal with Braintree in 2013; it is operated by PayPal, Inc., which holds money-transmitter licences in every US state and is not a bank, and business profiles were opened to all sellers in February 2021. On PayPal's fee page as of September 2026 a business profile pays 1.9% + $0.10 on every payment of $1 or more it receives from another Venmo account, and 2.29% + $0.09 on a contactless card or wallet accepted with Tap to Pay, which is available on iPhone and Android in the United States only. There are no monthly, setup or chargeback fees, receiving is unlimited, and money moves to a bank for free in one to three business days or in minutes for 1.75% (minimum $0.25, maximum $25). The customer pays nothing extra, even when funding with a credit card, and buyers get Venmo's Purchase Protection on business-profile payments. What it is not is a merchant account: there is no interchange-plus, no invoicing, no card-on-file, no integrations, no seller protection beyond documented shipped-goods claims, one login per profile, management only in the app — and an operator whose 1.1 TrustScore from 1,268 reviews and 4,581 BBB complaints in three years are dominated by frozen accounts and held balances.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

2.5

Ease of use

4.0

Jobber

POS & Business Software

B+

Jobber is field-service management software for home-service businesses — lawn care, cleaning, HVAC, plumbing, electrical and about fifty other trades — with card and bank processing built in as Jobber Payments. The company, legally Octopusapp Inc., was founded in Edmonton, Alberta in 2011 by Sam Pillar and Forrest Zeisler and is still run by them; it raised US$100 million from General Atlantic in February 2023 and says more than 400,000 service professionals use the product. Jobber does not hold a merchant agreement itself: Jobber Payments is processed by Stripe, Inc. under Stripe's connected-account terms, which is what makes the rate card flat and the onboarding fast. As of September 2026 the published rates are the same on every plan — 2.9% + 30¢ for cards paid online through the client hub, 2.7% + 30¢ for Tap to Pay in the field, 1% for US bank payments (ACH), and an extra 1% for an instant payout — with a chargeback fee (amount unpublished) that is refunded if you win and no monthly processing charge beyond the software subscription, which runs from $49 a month (Core, one user, no commitment) to $199 a month (Grow) at list. Payouts run on a rolling two-business-day window after a five-day authorization period on the first payment; ACH takes about four business days. The processing is available in the US, Canada and the UK; ACH, the card reader and the Jobber Money account are US-only. The trade-off is the software: its subscription is the real cost, it auto-renews, and prepaid annual fees are non-refundable, which is the substance of most of the complaints on record.

Housecall Pro

POS & Business Software

B-

Housecall Pro is field-service software for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, cleaning and other home-service trades, with card, ACH and consumer-financing acceptance built in as HCP Payments. Codefied Inc., which trades as Housecall Pro, was founded in San Diego in 2013 by a team including Ian Heidt and Roland Ligtenberg, took $125 million from Permira Growth Opportunities and Vista Credit Partners in June 2022, has since moved its headquarters to Denver, and says more than 200,000 home-service professionals use the product. The processing is Stripe's: the terms of service bind every customer to Stripe's Services and Connected Account agreements, and Stripe applies the $25 dispute fee. The rates, published in the help centre as of September 2026, are percentage-only with no per-transaction cents — 2.59% for cards dipped, tapped or swiped in the field (Tap to Pay adds $5 per active device a month), 2.99% for cards paid online against an invoice, 3.49% for keyed, card-on-file and scanned cards and for American Express and business cards, 1% for ACH, 2.99% for PayPal and Venmo, and 4.99% for PayPal Pay Later and Klarna — with mobile check deposit free. Standard payouts take two business days, with up to seven for the first and Instapay in about 30 minutes for 1%. The software runs $79 a month (Basic, one user) to $329 a month (MAX, eight users) billed monthly, or $59 to $299 billed annually, with no long-term contract. The record is the problem: a 2.4 TrustScore from 638 reviews, 76 BBB complaints in three years and a steady stream of reports about held funds, surprise price increases and cancellations that require a phone call.

Vagaro

POS & Business Software

B

Vagaro is booking, point-of-sale and marketing software for salons, spas, barbers, medical spas, gyms and studios, sold from Pleasanton, California since 2009 by founder and chief executive Fred Helou. Card processing is built in through Vagaro Merchant Services, a registered ISO of PNC Bank, N.A., and priced on two published plans: small merchants under $4,000 a month pay 2.6% + $0.10 for swiped, dipped and tapped cards with no monthly fee, and large merchants above that pay 2.29% + $0.19 for $10 a month. Every keyed, online, card-on-file and membership charge is 3.5% + $0.19 on either plan, card-brand FANF and Mastercard location fees pass through, buy-now-pay-later through Affirm costs 6% + $0.30, and surcharging is not allowed. Deposits arrive the next business day after a batch, with same-day and instant payouts at 1.75%. The software is $30 a month for one calendar (currently $23.99 for the first six months) plus $10 a calendar up to seven, month to month with no cancellation fee, and the US marketplace listing is free — Vagaro only takes a 20% cut when you opt into its Fill My Books promotions. The rate card is clear and competitive in person; the weak spots are the keyed rate, a BBB review score of 1.09 out of 5 with recurring complaints of duplicate charges and hardware warranty disputes, and the lack of any way to pass fees on to clients.

FreshBooks Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

FreshBooks Payments is the built-in way to get paid on a FreshBooks invoice. FreshBooks, the Toronto accounting software company founded in 2003 by Mike McDerment, rebuilt the product on Stripe Connect in 2024, retiring the WePay-powered version in the process, and now runs it as a white-labelled Stripe account you open from inside FreshBooks. It is sold only to businesses in the United States and Canada, on top of a FreshBooks subscription ($23 to $70 a month at list, or the custom Select plan). Published US pricing is 2.9% + $0.30 on domestic consumer cards, 3.5% + $0.30 on American Express and business cards, 1% on ACH with no cap outside Select, 3.5% + $0.30 on anything run through the $20-a-month Advanced Payments add-on (virtual terminal, saved cards, AutoPay), 6% + $0.30 on Affirm and Afterpay, plus 1.5% for cards issued abroad, 2% for currency conversion and $15 per dispute. Card money arrives two business days after the charge once the account is established, but every new account waits seven business days for its first payout, and Stripe's reserves and verification holds apply. There is no monthly fee, no minimum and no contract for the payments product itself. It is convenient and priced at the Stripe standard for small invoices; it is a poor fit for a business collecting large bank transfers, which pay the full 1% with no ceiling.

Blackbaud Merchant Services (Blackbaud Integrated Payments)

Payfac / Aggregator

C+

Blackbaud Merchant Services — renamed Blackbaud Integrated Payments (BBIP) in 2025 — is the payment processing built into Blackbaud's fundraising, school and CRM software: Raiser's Edge NXT, eTapestry, Luminate Online, Blackbaud Tuition Management and the rest. Blackbaud, founded in Charleston, South Carolina in 1981 and listed on Nasdaq, does not process or hold the money itself; under its August 2025 payments terms the designated processor is Stripe, Inc., and each organization signs Stripe's sub-merchant agreement through Blackbaud. The published US rate is 2.99% + $0.30 per card transaction (3.5% + $0.30 on American Express), 1% + $0.30 capped at $5 for ACH, and a $15 chargeback fee, with no setup or monthly processing fee. What the rate card does not show is the rest of the bill: a payment enablement fee charged to every customer with a payments-capable product whether or not they process anything, a new online-form platform fee of 1.5% to 2% on top of processing from 1 July 2026, and a software subscription that renews on a standard three-year term unless you give 45 days' notice. Add the 2020 ransomware breach — a $49.5 million multistate settlement, a $3 million SEC penalty, a $6.8 million California judgment and a 2024 FTC order — and a D- BBB rating for the company, and the convenience of one integrated system carries a real cost. It is the default for organizations already committed to Blackbaud software; it is not a processor anyone picks on its own merits.

Truist Merchant Services

Platform / Acquirer

B-

Truist Merchant Services is the card-acceptance arm of Truist Bank, the Charlotte, North Carolina bank formed in December 2019 by the merger of BB&T and SunTrust. Unlike most bank programmes, which refer merchants to Fiserv or another processor, Truist Bank is itself the counterparty on the merchant agreement: it bought out its former joint venture, SunTrust Merchant Services, LLC, in 2022 for $175 million and now runs the book directly, and in mid-2025 it began rolling out Truist Merchant Engage, a Pollinate-built dashboard that puts merchant services inside the bank's business-banking experience. The pitch is next-business-day funding into a Truist business checking account, in-house consultants rather than agents, and statement credits for balances of $25,000 or more. The price of that convenience is a contract written for the bank: no published rates, a three-year initial term with one-year auto-renewals, a $500 early-termination fee per merchant account ($250 in a renewal term), and the right to demand a reserve on seven days' notice. It is a reasonable option for a Truist business customer who negotiates; it is not one to sign without reading the Merchant Program Guide.

ProPay

Payfac / Aggregator

C+

ProPay is a Lindon, Utah payment facilitator that has sold instant-activation card acceptance to home-based sellers, direct-selling distributors and small merchants since 1997, and now operates as a subsidiary of Global Payments after TSYS bought it for $123.7 million in December 2012. Its model is unusual: an annual membership fee rather than a monthly one, a flat blended rate, funds that settle into a ProPay account before being transferred to your bank for a per-transfer fee, and single-transaction and monthly processing caps that rise only with history. As of September 2026 the public pricing page's rate table is empty, so the only official numbers are a fee schedule that says 'up to 3.50% plus $0.35' per card transaction and an annual membership fee of 'up to $299.95'. The Better Business Bureau shows 240 complaints in three years and an average review score of 1.02 out of 5, and ProPay remains a defendant in the TelexFree pyramid-scheme litigation twelve years after it was filed. It works as a plumbing layer for direct-selling companies; as a standalone merchant account it is hard to recommend over a modern aggregator.

Fresha

POS & Business Software

B+

Fresha is the London-based booking and business platform for salons, barbershops, spas and wellness studios, founded as Shedul in 2015 by William Zeqiri and Nick Miller and renamed in 2019. It became a unicorn in May 2026 when KKR invested $80 million at a valuation above $1 billion, at which point it said it served more than 130,000 businesses, handled 35 million appointments a month and about $15 billion a year in gross merchandise value, and was profitable on a $140 million revenue run-rate. Payments are embedded in the software through Adyen for Platforms: as of September 2026 the US rate card is 2.29% plus $0.20 in person (plus $0.10 per Tap to Pay authorisation), 2.79% plus $0.20 online, 3.30% plus $0.20 for manually keyed cards and 5.99% plus $0.30 for Klarna instalments, with payouts the next business day, no contract and no early-termination fee. The software itself stopped being free in 2025 — plans are $19.95 a month for one person or $14.95 per bookable team member — and clients who find you on the Fresha marketplace cost a one-off 20% commission with a $6 minimum. Trustpilot rates it 4.8 from more than 7,000 reviews. It grades B+ on clear pricing and terms, with the marks held back by the marketplace fee, the 2025 pricing shift and the payout holds that come with any aggregator.

Razorpay

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Razorpay is the largest online payment aggregator in India, founded in Bengaluru in 2014 by Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar and licensed by the Reserve Bank of India as an online, offline and cross-border payment aggregator. It charges a published flat 2% platform fee plus 18% GST on domestic cards, UPI, netbanking and wallets, with no setup fee, no annual charge and free refunds, and reported operating revenue of ₹3,783 crore for the year to March 2025 on an annualised payment volume it put at $180 billion. The product is genuinely good and the pricing is clear; the reason it does not grade higher is the other side of the ledger: a Trustpilot score of 1.4 from 449 reviews dominated by frozen accounts and held settlements, a year-long RBI ban on onboarding new merchants that ended in December 2023, and a corporate story — a March 2025 reverse flip from the United States to India, a one-time charge that pushed it into loss, and a confidential IPO filing in June 2026 — that is still being written.

Flutterwave

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Flutterwave is the payment aggregator that most international businesses use to collect from customers across Africa. Founded in 2016 by Olugbenga Agboola and Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, headquartered in San Francisco and Lagos, licensed in 34 African countries and holding Nigeria's switching-and-processing licence since 2022 and a microfinance-bank licence since April 2026, it says it has processed more than a billion transactions worth over $50 billion and was valued at $3.2 billion in June 2026 when Ripple joined its Series E. Pricing is published per country and is simple — 2% on local cards in Nigeria, 2.9% on mobile money in Kenya, 4.8% on any international card since November 2024 — with next-day local settlement and no monthly fee. The B-minus reflects a record a merchant should read before relying on it: Kenya froze about $52 million of its funds in 2022 on money-laundering suspicions (the case was withdrawn in 2023 and the money returned), it still has no Kenyan licence of its own, and a 2023 technical glitch let POS merchants move about ₦19 billion out of the platform.

Deluxe Merchant Services

ISO

B-

Deluxe Merchant Services is the card-acquiring arm of Deluxe Corporation, the Minneapolis company founded in 1915 whose largest product line is still printing checks (32.4% of 2025 revenue) and which now earns 18.7% of its revenue from merchant processing. The business is First American Payment Systems of Fort Worth, Texas, founded in 1992 and bought by Deluxe for $960 million in June 2021, plus Celero Commerce, bought for about $625 million on 31 July 2026; together they process roughly $70 billion a year for around 210,000 merchants as a registered ISO of Fifth Third Bank, which Deluxe says makes it one of the ten largest non-bank acquirers in the United States. The scale, the listed parent and 24/7 support are real advantages. Against them: Deluxe publishes no rates, First American's model is tiered pricing on a three-year auto-renewing agreement with an early-termination fee that third-party reviewers put at up to $495, and in July 2022 First American settled a Federal Trade Commission action over hidden exit fees and unauthorised withdrawals for $4.9 million in refunds.

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.

Tyro

Platform / Acquirer

B+

Tyro Payments Limited is a Sydney-based merchant acquirer and bank, founded in 2003, granted a specialist credit card institution licence in 2005 and a full Australian banking licence in 2015, and listed on the ASX as TYR since 2019. It serves more than 77,800 Australian merchants, processed $44.3 billion in transaction value in the year to June 2026, and reported gross profit of $231.8 million, EBITDA of $66.9 million and statutory profit before tax of $22.3 million for that year. Its pricing is published and flat: 1.3% including GST on every card transaction for businesses under $20,000 a month, a custom quote above that, and a Pro Touch or Pro Key terminal at $29 a month, a Pro Lite at $19, or a Tap to Pay app on your own phone for nothing — with no lock-in contract, no joining fee and no break fee. New customers transacting more than $20,000 a month who join before 24 November 2026 get 1% until 31 March 2027. Takings settle seven days a week, the same day, into a fee-free Tyro Transaction Account protected by the Financial Claims Scheme, or next business day to an outside bank. Tyro integrates with more than 580 POS and practice-management systems, routes debit through the cheapest network with Tap & Save, and lends up to $400,000 against card takings. The record has one scar: a January 2021 terminal outage that left some merchants unable to take cards for weeks and produced a Federal Court class action that Tyro settled in principle in February 2023 without admitting liability. Nigel Lee became chief executive in January 2026, and Tyro's Australian Trustpilot profile is 4.2 from about 560 reviews, 69% five-star and 20% one-star.

Flywire

Platform / Acquirer

B

Flywire is a Boston-headquartered payments platform, incorporated in July 2009 as peerTransfer to move international tuition money and renamed Flywire in 2016, that now collects large, often cross-border receivables for about 5,300 clients in education, healthcare, travel and B2B — more than 3,300 educational institutions, more than 150 healthcare systems and roughly 1,800 travel and business clients. It listed on Nasdaq as FLYW in May 2021, processed $37.6 billion in total payment volume in 2025 on revenue of $623 million and net income of $13.5 million, and has bought its way into new verticals: Simplee (healthcare, 2020), WPM (UK universities, 2021), Cohort Go (2022), StudyLink (Australian admissions, 2023), Invoiced (B2B receivables, 2024) and Sertifi (hotel payments, $330 million, February 2025). Clients sign negotiated agreements and Flywire publishes no rate card; its revenue is a percentage of each payment that varies by payment method, currency pair and region, plus fixed fees on domestic transactions, and the payer sees the total, including any Flywire fee and the currency conversion, before confirming. Its subsidiary Flywire Global Corp. holds money-transmitter licences in 46 US jurisdictions. Two things temper the picture: a securities class action, Hickman v. Flywire, has been pending in the Eastern District of New York since July 2025 over how the company described the effect of student-visa policy on its growth, and Flywire has voluntarily reported apparent sanctions violations to OFAC after an internal review. Its Trustpilot score is 4.0 from about 3,150 reviews, mostly written by students and patients paying through it rather than the institutions that choose it.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

Teya

Platform / Acquirer

B

Teya is a London-headquartered payments and business-banking company founded in 2019 as SaltPay by Ali Mazanderani and Eduardo Pontes, renamed in April 2023, and backed by investors including Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital and Michael Spencer — total funding is reported at about $845 million by data providers and $1.1 billion by The Business of Payments. It grew by acquisition — Iceland's Borgun in 2020, the UK's RMS Group in 2022 and the Czech ePOS company Storyous among them — and now sells to small businesses in nine European markets, the UK, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia and Spain, with Spain and Italy launched commercially in February 2026. In the UK the offer is a Teya Pro or Teya Lite card machine from £14.99 a month with a lifetime warranty, Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android, online payments, and a free e-money Business Account that card takings settle into next working day as standard, every day including weekends and bank holidays as an option, or in seconds with Instant Settlements. Rates are quoted rather than published — the pricing page says there is no standard price list, the card-machine page says fees start at 1.59% — and using an outside bank account instead of Teya's adds 0.10% to every transaction. Teya Solutions Ltd is an electronic money institution authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (reference 978181), so the account is safeguarded rather than FSCS-protected. Its UK Trustpilot profile is 4.4 from about 1,500 reviews, 82% five-star and 15% one-star, and the one-star reviews are about held funds and unreturned calls.

myPOS

Platform / Acquirer

B

myPOS is a London-headquartered payments company founded in 2012 by Christo Georgiev and owned since February 2024 by the private-equity firm Advent International in a deal reported at around €500 million, after which the founder exited and Mario Shiliashki, formerly of Mastercard and PayPal, became chief executive. It sells card machines outright — the myPOS Go 2 at £39, Flex at £59, Go Combo at £169 and Ultra at £179, all excluding VAT — with no monthly fee, and settles every card payment instantly into a free myPOS e-money business account with a Mastercard business card, a model it says it pioneered in 2014. The UK rate card is published for businesses under £10,000 a month: 1.10% + 7p on domestic consumer cards, 2.20% + 7p on EEA consumer cards, 2.45% + 7p on American Express and 2.85% + 7p on everything else in person, and 1.30% + 15p domestic, 2.50% + 15p Amex and 2.90% + 15p other cards online; larger businesses get a custom quote. UK, Gibraltar and Swiss services are provided by myPOS Payments Ltd, an electronic money institution authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (reference 900826), and the group says it serves more than 400,000 merchants in over 30 countries with 15 physical stores, up from the 170,000 small businesses Reuters reported when the sale was agreed. Its Trustpilot profile is 4.2 from nearly 22,000 reviews, 70% five-star and 13% one-star, and the one-star reviews are about unexplained application rejections, slow deliveries and support that is hard to reach.

CDGcommerce

ISO

B+

CDGcommerce is a family-owned merchant services provider founded in 1998 by Chris and Laura West and based in Port Orange, Florida, operating as a registered ISO/MSP of Pinnacle Bank (dba Synovus Bank) and Citizens Bank, N.A. It is unusual among independent sales organisations for publishing its entire rate card: a flat-rate plan at 2.90% + $0.30 in person and 3.50% + $0.30 online with a $9.95 monthly fee, an interchange-plus plan at interchange + 0.30% + $0.10 retail, + 0.35% + $0.15 online and + 0.25% + $0.10 for non-profits, and a wholesale membership at $49 to $199 a month paid annually with per-transaction cents from 15¢ down to 6¢. Its own Quantum gateway and virtual terminal are free, there are no PCI, annual, statement or gateway fees, and — in the company's words — in more than twenty years it has never required a contract length or termination fee. It holds an A+ rating and BBB accreditation since 2020 with two complaints closed in three years, and it makes no attempt to serve merchants outside the United States or in adult, cannabis or telemarketing categories. The weaknesses are the ones that come with a small shop: a thin self-service knowledge base, a Dejavoo terminal that carries a $79-a-year update charge, and third-party reports of funding holds and terminations on riskier accounts.

Zeller

Platform / Acquirer

B+

Zeller is a Melbourne payments and business-banking company founded in 2020 by Ben Pfisterer, who had led Square's Asia-Pacific team, and Dominic Yap, and launched in May 2021. It sells an EFTPOS terminal outright — the Zeller Terminal 1x and the newer Zeller Terminal 2, both listed at A$99 on promotion in September 2026 — with no monthly rental, no lock-in contract and a flat 1.4% on every in-person card, American Express included, falling to 1.2% when payments run through its free Zeller POS software. Every merchant gets a Zeller Transaction Account and debit card at no cost, with card takings settled into it nightly and available the next business day at an outside bank. It also offers invoices, a virtual terminal, Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android, corporate expense cards and, from April 2026, a UK operation priced at 1.3% on domestic Visa and Mastercard. The company reached a valuation above A$1 billion ten months after launch on the back of a A$100 million Series B in March 2022 and says more than 100,000 Australian businesses use it. Zeller Australia Pty Ltd holds an Australian financial services licence and is a principal member of Mastercard; merchant funds are held in a segregated account at Cuscal rather than in a bank deposit. The pricing is among the simplest in the Australian market and the hardware is well regarded; the recurring complaint is the one every fintech acquirer attracts — funds frozen pending documents, with slow answers.

Wix Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Wix Payments is the native payment processor inside Wix, the website builder founded in Tel Aviv in 2006 by Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan and listed on Nasdaq since 2013. It lets a Wix merchant accept cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal and instalment plans from Affirm, Afterpay and Klarna without connecting a third-party processor, with payments, payouts, refunds and disputes managed from the Wix dashboard. Wix's own help centre says it is available in fifteen countries and, in its terms, that the processing underneath is handled by Adyen and Stripe in most regions and by Pagar.me in Brazil — so this is a payment facilitator layered on other acquirers rather than a new one. US pricing is published in full: 2.9% plus 30¢ on standard cards online, 3.7% plus 30¢ on American Express, 2.6% flat on the Wix POS hardware, 2.6% plus 20¢ for Tap to Pay, 3.5% plus 30¢ keyed, 6% plus 30¢ on the instalment options, a 1.5% cross-border surcharge and a $15 chargeback fee. Payouts run daily, weekly or monthly and reach a US bank in three to five business days after a two-to-five-day pending period. The case for it is one dashboard, a competitive in-person rate and a real hardware line; the case against is that online it costs exactly what Stripe charges directly, Amex is expensive, Wix's documented reserve and hold policy gives it wide latitude over your money, and support is chat and callback only.

LawPay (8am, formerly AffiniPay)

ISO

B+

LawPay is the payment processor built for law firms by AffiniPay, the Austin, Texas company Amy Porter founded in 2005 and which rebranded its corporate identity as 8am in August 2025; the product now trades as 8am LawPay. Launched in 2007, it is offered through all fifty state bar associations and more than sixty local and specialty bars, describes itself as the only ABA-recommended payment solution for the legal industry, and says more than 120,000 lawyers use it. Its reason for existing is trust accounting: card fees are debited from the firm's operating account rather than the client trust or IOLTA account, and chargebacks and refunds cannot be pulled from trust funds, which is what the bar rules require and what a general-purpose processor cannot promise. Pricing is published in full and interchange-free: $19 a month with no contract, 2.99% plus 30¢ on Visa, Mastercard and Discover, 3.90% plus 30¢ on American Express, 1% on eCheck, 5.95% on its Pay Later legal-fee financing, plus a $7.99 monthly card-brand pass-through fee and 1.75% on foreign cards. Since January 2024 eligible firms have had next-business-day funding on cards and eCheck, and since April 2026 8am has guaranteed it. 8am, LLC operates as an independent sales organization of Fifth Third Bank, Wells Fargo Bank, Synovus Bank and Fiserv Canada. The record is good: an A+ BBB rating with fourteen complaints in three years, and a Trustpilot profile that is 78% five-star. The costs are a card rate a tenth of a point above Stripe's, an Amex rate near four percent, and a pass-through fee that reviewers say catches firms unawares.

Squarespace Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Squarespace Payments is the native payment processor inside Squarespace, the New York website builder founded by Anthony Casalena in 2003 and taken private by Permira in October 2024 for about $7.2bn. Announced in October 2023 and rolled out first in the United States, it now covers fifteen countries and lets a Squarespace merchant accept cards, ACH, Klarna, Afterpay and other methods without connecting Stripe or PayPal, with payments, payouts, refunds and disputes managed inside the Squarespace dashboard. Underneath, Squarespace's own help documentation describes Stripe as its processing services partner, so this is a payment facilitator layered on Stripe rather than a new acquirer. US pricing is published in full: 2.9% plus 30¢ on standard cards on the Basic and Core plans, 2.7% on Plus and 2.5% on Advanced, a 1.5% surcharge on international cards, 3.2% plus 30¢ on American Express and premium cards, ACH at 1% to 1.5%, and a $20 dispute fee. Payouts are daily and reach a US bank account in one to two business days. The case for it is convenience and, on the higher plans, a modest rate cut; the case against is that it is no cheaper than Stripe direct on the plans most merchants are on, it is locked to Squarespace, and a steady stream of complaints describes risk holds on funds with no phone number to call.

Lemon Squeezy

Merchant of Record

C+

Lemon Squeezy is a merchant-of-record platform for selling software, digital downloads, subscriptions and licence keys, launched publicly in 2021 by a small team of founders led by JR Farr and acquired by Stripe in July 2024. As merchant of record it is the legal seller of record on every transaction: it collects and remits sales tax and VAT worldwide, absorbs fraud and chargeback liability, and pays the merchant a net amount twice a month. The price is one number — 5% plus 50 cents per transaction, with no monthly fee — plus surcharges of 1.5% on international and PayPal transactions and 0.5% on subscription payments, and the tooling around it (checkout overlays, licence keys, signed download links, affiliates, email marketing) is unusually complete for the price. The catch is what has happened since the acquisition. Stripe has built its own merchant-of-record product, Stripe Managed Payments, priced at 3.5% on top of standard Stripe fees, and in January 2026 Lemon Squeezy's chief executive wrote that the team had been heads-down on it, that Lemon Squeezy users had seen slower support and fewer updates as a result, and that the goal was to give them an easy way to migrate. Independent sentiment has collapsed accordingly: 1.2 on Trustpilot from 173 reviews, 88% of them one-star, mostly about onboarding rejections and unanswered support requests. The product still works and still signs up new merchants, but a buyer today is choosing a platform whose own maker is steering customers to its successor.

Dojo

Platform / Acquirer

B

Dojo is the trading name of Paymentsense Limited, a London company incorporated in 2008 that grew into one of the UK's largest card-terminal resellers before rebuilding itself, from 2020, as a cloud-native acquirer under the Dojo brand. It now holds its own acquiring licence rather than reselling Fiserv's, and by its own filings handled £46.2bn of card volume for roughly 146,000 merchant locations in the year to March 2025 — a share it puts at 12.5% of UK small-business card-present acquiring. The pitch is simple: a fast card machine, money in your account the next day including weekends and bank holidays, integration with more than 450 EPOS systems, and a UK phone line. For businesses turning over less than £100,000 a year on cards there is a published Fix plan at £39.99 a month covering the first £3,999 of monthly card turnover, with 1% above that. Everyone larger gets a quote. Independent satisfaction is strong — 4.2 on Trustpilot from 5,612 reviews, 88% of them five-star — and the company is FCA-authorised. Against that sit a 12-month minimum term with the remaining terminal fees payable if you leave early, custom pricing that cannot be benchmarked, a fee schedule with £28 chargebacks and a £15-a-month PCI non-compliance charge, and a balance sheet carrying £649m of net debt at a 14% effective interest rate.

Viva.com

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Viva.com is a European payments company and licensed bank, headquartered in Athens, that sells card acceptance, a business account, cards and financing to small and medium businesses on one platform. It is unusual in two ways that matter to anyone comparing processors. The first is disclosure: where almost every acquirer in Europe quotes privately, Viva.com publishes a full price pack per country — acquiring rate, scheme pass-throughs, plan fees, dispute fees, investigation fees and cash-withdrawal charges, line by line, with an effective date stamped at the bottom. For UK consumer cards in September 2026 that pack quotes 1.69% for card-present with a 1p minimum per transaction, and 2.19% + 24p online. The second is its licence. Viva is not an intermediary reselling somebody else's acquiring: the group holds a Greek banking licence, acquired with Praxia Bank in 2020, alongside an e-money licence from the Bank of Greece, and it describes itself as Europe's first full tech bank for businesses, operating across 29 European countries. J.P. Morgan has owned 48.5% since December 2022, with the founders holding the balance — a stake that has also produced several years of shareholder litigation between the two.

takepayments

ISO

B

takepayments is a Stockport-based reseller of card machines, online payments and POS systems to UK small businesses, and since June 2024 it has been a Global Payments company. It does not hold your merchant agreement: its own terms make clear that a customer enters a separate contract with an acquiring bank for the transaction processing, while takepayments supplies the terminal, the onboarding, the PCI compliance help and the support line. Two things stand out. The first is its service record, which is the strongest of any provider reviewed on this site by volume: 4.8 on Trustpilot across 66,994 reviews, 94% of them five-star, with more than 6,000 arriving in the last twelve months. The second is that it publishes no prices whatsoever. Rates, standing charges and terminal costs are all quoted by a field consultant after a visit, on a twelve-month minimum term that then runs monthly. The company is older than its name suggests: Companies House records the entity as incorporated on 14 September 1995 and shows it trading as Targeted Transaction Managed Services, then Alphyra UK, then Payzone UK, before taking the takepayments name in December 2019.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.5

Paystand

Bank / A2A Payments

B-

Paystand is a California B2B payments and accounts-receivable company, founded in 2013 by Jeremy Almond and Scott Campbell, built on a premise that inverts how this industry normally charges: you pay a flat monthly subscription rather than a percentage of every transaction. Its own bank-to-bank network carries payments between businesses at no transaction fee, while card and ACH acceptance are resold at what it describes as pre-negotiated wholesale rates, and the software sits on top automating invoicing, collections and reconciliation against ERP systems like NetSuite. It bought the spend-management company Teampay in April 2024, which took it into accounts payable as well, and it says the combined network now touches more than a million businesses with over $20bn in payment volume processed. In April 2026 it launched USDb, a stablecoin backed one-to-one by dollar reserves and issued on two Bitcoin layers — a genuine strategic bet, and the thing most likely to decide whether a given finance team sees Paystand as forward-looking or as a risk it does not need.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.0

Swipesum

Agent Office / Reseller

B

Swipesum is a St. Louis payments advisory founded in 2016 by brothers Michael and Stephen Seaman, and it sells something most companies in this market do not: advice about the processor you already have. Its core work is the statement audit — running a merchant's monthly processing statement through its own software, called Staitment, to separate interchange from processor markup, identify what is negotiable, and quantify what is being overpaid. From there it will renegotiate with the incumbent, run a competitive process across a network it describes as more than seventy providers, and handle the implementation. It describes itself as a fractional chief payments officer rather than an independent sales organisation, and unusually for this corner of the industry it publishes actual prices: the evaluation and implementation service is free, enterprise consulting starts at $50 an hour, and a single statement analysis is $75. It claims to have analysed over $300.5 billion in processing volume since 2016, and it has made the Inc. 5000 three years running — No. 729 in 2023, No. 666 in 2024, and again in 2025.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Sunbit

BNPL Network

B

Sunbit is a Los Angeles financing company, founded in 2016, that puts pay-over-time options at the counter of everyday service businesses rather than at an online checkout. Its natural habitat is the unplanned bill: a $1,400 transmission repair, a root canal, a dog that swallowed something it should not have. The technology and the servicing are Sunbit's; the credit itself is not. Loans and the Sunbit Card are issued by Transportation Alliance Bank, trading as TAB Bank, which is the lender of record. Merchants are told customers can finance totals from $60 to $20,000, that roughly 90% of applicants are approved, and that the application takes about thirty seconds at the point of service. Sunbit's own pages variously describe a network of over 30,000 and over 40,000 locations, concentrated in dentistry, auto service, veterinary care, optical, powersports and general healthcare. The consumer record is unusually good for this category — 4.7 out of 5 across 3,977 Trustpilot reviews and an A+ BBB rating, accredited since 2020 — and Sunbit says it has now made the Forbes Fintech 50 three years running and the Inc. 5000 five. What it does not do is publish what it charges the merchant.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.5

Splitit

BNPL Network

B-

Splitit is an Atlanta-headquartered installment provider that works differently from every other name in buy-now-pay-later. There is no loan, no application and no new account: the shopper pays with a credit card they already hold, Splitit places an authorization on the card for the full purchase amount, and the balance is charged down in monthly or bi-weekly instalments against that same card's existing credit line. Because no credit is being extended, nobody is declined for credit — Splitit advertises approval above 85% against 30–40% for conventional BNPL, and an average order value above $1,000 against roughly $250. The company began life as PayItSimple, rebranded in 2015, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, then took a $50m investment commitment from Motive Partners, delisted from the ASX and went private in December 2023. It is led by chief executive Nandan Sheth and registered in the United States as Splitit USA Inc., NMLS #2314339. Merchant pricing is quoted rather than published, across four plan tiers whose consumer APR ranges from 0% to 35.99% depending on which side absorbs the cost.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Payabli

Payfac / Aggregator

B

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

Fullsteam

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.0

Aeropay

Bank / A2A Payments

B-

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

BNPL Network

B

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

ISO

B

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.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

PAR Technology

POS & Business Software

B

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

Gateway / Orchestration

C

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

ISO

B

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

ISO

B-

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.

Revolut Business

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Revolut Business is the merchant-acceptance arm of Revolut, the London fintech founded in 2015 by Nik Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko. It is unusual in this directory for a simple reason: it publishes a complete rate card. A merchant can read, before speaking to anyone, that in-person domestic consumer Visa and Mastercard transactions cost 0.8% + £0.02, that the same cards online cost 1% + £0.20, that commercial and international cards cost 2.6% + £0.02 in person and 2.8% + £0.20 online, that a Revolut Terminal is £169 + VAT and a Lite Terminal £129 + VAT, and that a chargeback dispute resolved in the merchant's favour returns £15. Acceptance is a sub-account of a Revolut Business account rather than a separate merchant account with a separate provider, so settlement lands in the same balance the business already banks from, in as little as 24 hours. The important limit is geographic: Revolut has offered acquiring across the UK and continental Europe since 2020–21 — its own January 2021 announcement put the count at 29 European countries, a figure it has not refreshed since — and launched a full merchant-acquiring suite in Australia during 2026. It publishes no United States card-acceptance rates. In March 2026 Revolut exited the Bank of England's mobilisation phase and received a full UK banking licence, roughly twenty months after being granted one with restrictions in July 2024.

Nexi

Platform / Acquirer

B

Nexi S.p.A. is one of Europe's largest payments companies, headquartered in Milan and traded on Euronext Milan, and describes itself as Europe's PayTech. It was assembled through consolidation — most consequentially the merger with the Danish group Nets, completed on 1 July 2021, and the merger with the Italian rival SIA, effective 1 January 2022, which together were widely reported as creating the largest European paytech by EBITDA — and now runs three businesses: Merchant Solutions (acquiring and acceptance), Issuing Solutions (card issuing and processing for banks) and Digital Banking Solutions (clearing, open banking, ATM and network services). Adyen carries a far larger market value and Worldline has at times been described as Europe's largest acquirer by revenue, so "largest" depends on the measure — but the scale is not in doubt. In the first half of 2026 the group reported net revenues of €1,736 million, EBITDA of €870 million and merchant transactions of 10,225 million worth €423 billion, with Merchant Solutions accounting for roughly 56% of revenue. What a merchant will not find is a price. Nexi sells overwhelmingly through partner banks and through country brands rather than direct, so acceptance terms are set by whichever bank or channel signs the merchant, and there is no group rate card to compare. The company is also in transition at the top: in March 2026 it appointed Bernardo Mingrone, previously group chief financial officer and CEO of Nexi Payments, to succeed Paolo Bertoluzzo after a decade as chief executive, and the shares fell on the announcement.

Lavu

POS & Business Software

B-

Lavu is an Albuquerque restaurant technology company founded in 2010 by Andy Lim, and it has a genuine claim to being the first restaurant point-of-sale system built for the iPad. It raised a $15 million investment from Aldrich Capital Partners in 2015 — reported at the time as the largest Series A in New Mexico's history — and has since assembled a full restaurant stack around the till: a kitchen display system, online and contactless ordering, a dual-pricing (cash discount) programme, payroll, back office and its own payment processing under the name Lavu Pay. Through 2026 the company repositioned hard around Marty AI, an overnight analysis layer that reads point-of-sale, labour and inventory data and delivers a "Morning Deposit" briefing of recoverable cash to managers before service, published a comparative report on AI capabilities across seven major restaurant POS platforms in March 2026, and now markets itself as an intelligent financial operating system rather than a till. Independent reviewers place its plans at roughly $59, $129 and $279 a month with a three-year commitment; Lavu itself no longer publishes a pricing page.

Afterpay

BNPL Network

B

Afterpay is the buy-now-pay-later network founded in Sydney in October 2014 by Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen, and owned since January 2022 by Block, Inc. — the deal was announced in August 2021 at a headline US$29 billion and completed on far less, reported at roughly US$14 billion in Class A shares, because Block's own share price had fallen in the interim. For a merchant, the proposition is straightforward: offer shoppers four interest-free instalments over six weeks, or a monthly plan over six or twelve months, get paid up front rather than waiting for the customer to finish paying, and let Afterpay carry the fraud and non-payment risk. In exchange the merchant pays a commission Afterpay does not publish — third-party reviewers consistently report a range around 4% to 6% plus roughly $0.30 per transaction, several times the cost of taking the same sale on a card. Afterpay's own merchant marketing claims a 58% increase in average order value among accepting merchants and $8.6 billion of incremental US sales delivered over the preceding twelve months. Under Block, the product has increasingly become a Cash App feature rather than a standalone checkout button: Afterpay Post-Purchase and, from 2026, Afterpay Pre-Purchase let Cash App Card holders convert everyday card spend into instalments at any merchant, whether or not that merchant has ever signed an Afterpay agreement.

Wave (Wave Financial)

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Wave is a Toronto software company, started in April 2010, that gives away accounting and invoicing to very small businesses and makes its money when those invoices get paid. H&R Block bought it for $405 million in a deal that closed on 1 July 2019, and it has been a subsidiary ever since. Payments run at 2.9% plus 60 cents for Visa, Mastercard and Discover, 3.4% plus 60 cents for American Express, and 1% with a $1 minimum for bank payments, with no monthly fee on the free Starter plan; a $19-a-month Pro plan waives the 60-cent card fee on the first ten transactions each month and adds features. Card money lands in one to two business days, bank payments in one to seven, and eligible accounts can pull an instant payout to a debit card for a further 1%. Since November 2020 Wave has served the United States and Canada only. Its US card processing is powered by Adyen and Stripe, which Wave discloses in its own terms.

Riverside Payments

ISO

C+

Riverside Payments is an independent sales organisation in Vancouver, Washington, registered with the Better Business Bureau since 2014 and a registered ISO of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. of Concord, California. It sells merchant accounts to small and mid-sized US businesses through a field sales force, pairing card processing with point-of-sale hardware from Clover, Dejavoo, TouchBistro, Aldelo and NCR. Its pitch is built on two promises that recur throughout its marketing: free and secure point-of-sale or credit card machines, and help getting out of a contract with your existing processor. It publishes no rates, no fees and no contract terms. The public record is where the difficulty lies: the BBB records 256 complaints against the company in the last three years, 71 of them closed in the last twelve months, with consistent themes of savings that did not materialise, difficulty cancelling, and equipment that turned out to be financed through a separate, non-cancelable 48-month third-party lease rather than supplied free.

PaySimple

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

PaySimple is a Denver payments-and-billing platform for service businesses — the kind that invoice, take deposits and bill the same customers month after month rather than ring up a counter. Its own about page dates the business to 2006 and puts it at more than 22,000 businesses; the site footer carries a 2005 copyright and the Better Business Bureau file records a December 2006 start, so the exact birth year depends on which document you read. What matters more is the lineage: the company Eric Remer founded as PaySimple is the company that was incorporated as EverCommerce in 2016 and listed on Nasdaq in 2021. PaySimple was not bought by EverCommerce so much as it became it, and the brand now sits inside that group as one product among many — the BBB file is registered to "EverCommerce Solutions Inc., DBA PaySimple Inc." PaySimple is a registered ISO of Fifth Third Bank and of Wells Fargo Bank. Pricing is published in full and unusually plain: $79.95 a month with every feature included, 2.9% plus 30 cents on cards, 1% plus 30 cents on ACH, no contract and no cancellation fee.

Merchant Lynx Services

ISO

C

Merchant Lynx Services is a Florida independent sales organisation, operating from Palm Beach Gardens as the trading name of Groundhog Enterprises, Inc., which the Better Business Bureau records as having started in April 1999. It is a registered ISO/MSP of Esquire Bank, N.A. of Jericho, New York and a registered ISO of Deutsche Bank AG, New York, and it sells card processing, its own Lynx POS system, check guarantee, gift cards, digital check imaging and merchant cash advances to small and mid-sized businesses across retail, hospitality, healthcare, education, automotive and government. The company advertises itself as an Inc. 5000 business and claims a ranking of 21st among US acquirers. The terms behind that sales pitch are published on its own website and are unusually onerous: the merchant agreement runs an initial three-year term, renews automatically for successive three-year terms unless cancelled with 90 days' written notice, and carries a $495 early-termination fee that can be deducted straight from settlements. Equipment leases are separately non-cancelable. The BBB rates the business F and revoked its accreditation.

Bluefin

Gateway / Orchestration

B

Bluefin is an Atlanta company that sells payment security rather than payment processing. Founded in 2007 and originally trading as Capital Payments, LLC doing business as Bluefin Payment Systems, it built its business on PCI-validated point-to-point encryption — technology that scrambles card data inside the terminal at the moment of the tap, so that what travels through the merchant's systems is already worthless to a thief. Around that it has assembled a gateway (PayConex), a decryption service sold to other processors and gateways (Decryptx), a tokenization platform for personal, health and card data (ShieldConex) and, more recently, a proxy layer called PointConex that adds validated encryption without forcing anyone to recertify their processor integrations. Bluefin says it now supports more than 40,000 customers across 60 countries through over 300 integration partners. Its headquarters is in Atlanta, with offices in Waterford, Ireland and Vienna, Austria; the Vienna presence came with its November 2022 acquisition of TECS Payment Systems. The Better Business Bureau rates it A+ and has accredited it since July 2017.

Sezzle

BNPL Network

B-

Sezzle is a Minneapolis buy-now-pay-later provider founded in 2016; Charlie Youakim, Paul Paradis and Killian Brackey are the co-founders named most consistently, though accounts of the full founding team differ. It began as a next-business-day ACH product and pivoted to instalments in 2017, listed on the Australian Securities Exchange on 30 July 2019, began trading on Nasdaq as SEZL on 17 August 2023 and left the ASX in January 2024. For the quarter ended 30 June 2026 it reported gross merchandise volume of $1.3 billion, up 37.9% year on year, total revenue of $149.7 million, up 51.7%, and net income of $40.8 million. For a merchant the bargain is the standard BNPL one but unusually cleanly stated: the shopper pays Sezzle a down payment, Sezzle pays you the full order value less your merchant rate, and Sezzle then carries both the fraud risk and the repayment risk for the six weeks that follow. What Sezzle does not do is tell you what that costs. There is no published merchant rate anywhere on its site — the fee is in the agreement you sign — and there are three separate ancillary charges most merchants only meet after signing.

QuickBooks Payments (Intuit)

Payfac / Aggregator

B

QuickBooks Payments is Intuit's card and bank-payment service, sold as an add-on to QuickBooks Online rather than as a standalone merchant account. Intuit was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California; money movement is provided by Intuit Payments Inc., licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and the card acquiring itself runs through JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. and Paymentech, LLC under the commercial entity merchant agreement Intuit publishes. Rates are published in full and, as of the figures Intuit dated 30 April 2026, are 2.5% for in-person payments, 2.99% for invoices and other card and digital-wallet transactions, 1% for ACH bank payments, 3.5% for keyed cards, and 2.99% for buy-now-pay-later through Affirm. There is no monthly fee for Payments itself, no minimum and no long-term contract. The defining trade-off is reconciliation: nothing else puts card, ACH, PayPal, Venmo and Affirm volume straight into your books with no matching step, and nothing else in this price band has quite the same reputation for freezing deposits.

PNC Merchant Services

Platform / Acquirer

C+

PNC Merchant Services is the card-acceptance arm of PNC Bank, and PNC describes it on its own site as an alliance between the bank and Fiserv — PNC owns the customer relationship and support, Fiserv provides the processing and the Clover hardware. It publishes flat rates, which most bank programmes do not: 2.60% plus $0.10 for a swiped, dipped or tapped card and 3.45% plus $0.15 for online, telephone or manually keyed transactions, with next-business-day funding on Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express when the money lands in a qualifying PNC business checking account. What it does not publish is the rest of the agreement — the monthly and annual account fees, the term length, and the liquidated-damages provision that applies if you leave early. That gap is not academic: in November 2021 PNC Merchant Services agreed to a settlement of up to $14.5 million to resolve two class actions brought by merchants over annual fees, early-termination fees and paper statement fees.

Melio

Bank / A2A Payments

B-

Melio is a US business bill-pay and accounts-payable platform founded in 2018 by Matan Bar, Ilan Atias and Ziv Paz, headquartered in New York with an R&D centre in Tel Aviv. It is not a card acquirer: instead of helping you take money from customers, it moves money out to your suppliers, letting you pay any vendor by ACH, cheque, wire or card even when that vendor accepts none of those, and syncing the result into QuickBooks, Xero or NetSuite. Xero announced its acquisition of Melio in June 2025 and completed it on 15 October 2025 for US$2.5 billion upfront in cash and equity, with up to a further US$0.5 billion payable over three years. Xero's announcement put Melio at 80,000 customers, more than US$30 billion of payments processed in FY25 and US$153 million of FY25 revenue. Melio publishes its entire fee schedule, which is rare in this market and the single strongest thing about it. Against that sits a Better Business Bureau rating of F and a large, consistent body of complaints about accounts suspended mid-payment with funds already in transit.

CardFlight (SwipeSimple)

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

CardFlight is a New York software company, founded in 2013 by Derek Webster, whose product SwipeSimple is the payment-acceptance app a great many American small businesses use without ever hearing the name CardFlight. That is by design: CardFlight has historically sold through banks, merchant acquirers and independent sales organisations, which rebrand or resell SwipeSimple to their own merchants, and the company says ten of the top thirty US merchant acquirers and ISOs have selected it as their preferred small-business acceptance product. It reports more than 125,000 small businesses on the platform as of August 2026. Alongside that channel business it now sells direct, as SwipeSimple Connect, with fully published pricing: 2.6% plus 10 cents in person, 3.5% plus 10 cents keyed, no monthly, annual, batch, statement or PCI fees, no contract, a $49 mobile reader and a $299 smart terminal. WestView Capital Partners took a growth stake in October 2024.

Payline Data

ISO

B

Payline Data is a Chicago merchant account provider that publishes its whole interchange-plus rate card on its home page: interchange plus 0.35% and 10 cents under $50,000 of monthly volume, sliding to interchange plus 0.15% and 8 cents above $1 million. That alone puts it in a small minority of US processors. It advertises no application fee, no cancellation fee and no term length, does not charge for PCI compliance, and funds next day. It is a registered ISO of Wells Fargo Bank N.A. and Fifth Third Bank N.A., says it serves more than 20,000 merchants, and takes high-risk business including nutraceuticals, subscriptions, firearms, CBD and adult. The complication a reader should know before signing is ownership: Payline was bought by Pineapple Payments in October 2017, and Fiserv bought Pineapple in May 2021, so Payline has been a Fiserv brand for five years. Nothing on Payline's own site says so.

Nayax

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Nayax is an Israeli payments and commerce platform built for unattended retail — vending machines, kiosks, car washes, laundromats, amusement machines, coffee service and, increasingly, EV charging. Founded in 2005 by Yair Nechmad and David Ben Avi and headquartered in Herzliya, it listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in May 2021 and on Nasdaq in September 2022. In the second quarter of 2026 it reported revenue of $122.6 million, up 28.2%, on total transaction value of $2.056 billion across 815 million transactions, 1.553 million managed and connected devices and 125,400 customers, at a blended take rate of 2.62%. Its US retail plan is published at $99 a month with no transaction fee on the first $5,000 of monthly volume. Against that: a February 2025 consent decree with the Israeli Competition Authority over its OTI acquisition, a July 2026 cloud security incident, 79 BBB complaints in three years and a 2.2-star Trustpilot.

Electronic Payments

ISO

B

Electronic Payments, Inc. — usually EPI — is a Calverton, New York merchant acquirer founded on 20 May 2000 by Michael Nardy while he was a student at Boston College. It is one of the few mid-sized US acquirers that runs its own stack rather than reselling somebody else's: Cygma, launched in 2023, is EPI's own authorization and clearing platform, and Exatouch, ProCharge, eGiftSolutions and the Vault gateway are in-house products. The company says it processes more than $26.5 billion a year across 60,000+ merchant partnerships and 486 million transactions, and calls itself the 23rd largest US acquirer. It bought UK-based Handpoint in August 2025, adding roughly 100 ISV integrations, 18,000 connected devices and more than $2 billion of annual volume plus reach into Canada, the UK and over 20 EEA markets. Its BBB file is unusually clean — A+, accredited since 2010, four complaints in three years. It publishes no pricing whatsoever.

dLocal

Platform / Acquirer

B-

dLocal is an emerging-markets payment platform founded in 2016 in Montevideo, Uruguay by Sergio Fogel and Andres Bzurovski, and listed on Nasdaq since June 2021 as DLO. It exists to solve one problem: a global business that wants to sell in Brazil, India, Nigeria or Indonesia has to accept Pix, boleto, GCash, M-Pesa, UPI and local cards, and settle in currencies with capital controls. dLocal covers 60+ countries and more than 1,000 payment methods through a single integration, and counts Amazon, Shopify, Dropbox, Mailchimp, Shein and Tripadvisor among its merchants. In 2025 it processed $41 billion of total payment volume, up 60%, on revenue of $1.09 billion and gross profit of $403 million. It is also the most legally scrutinised company in this category: two Muddy Waters short reports in late 2022, a reported Argentine government investigation in 2023, a New York IPO-disclosure class action that was dismissed and whose dismissal was upheld on appeal in April 2026, and a separate federal securities case in the Eastern District of New York that is still live.

Affirm

BNPL Network

B-

Affirm is a buy-now-pay-later provider founded in 2012 by Max Levchin, Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz and Alex Rampell, headquartered at 221 Main Street in San Francisco and listed on Nasdaq as AFRM since January 2021. For the fiscal year ended 30 June 2026 it reported $50.2 billion of gross merchandise volume, up 37%, across approximately 571,000 active merchants and 27.8 million active consumers. Merchants integrate Affirm as a checkout option, Affirm underwrites and funds the consumer, and the merchant is paid in full up front minus a fee. Two things make it materially different from card acceptance: Affirm bears the consumer fraud risk on transactions it approves, and the merchant fee is several times a card rate — third-party surveys of mid-market merchants report 2% to 8%, while Affirm's own filings put blended merchant network revenue at 2.3% of GMV in FY2026. Its BBB profile is A+ and accredited; its consumer Trustpilot score is 1.7 across roughly 7,700 reviews.

Xsolla

Merchant of Record

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

Moov

Payfac / Aggregator

B

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.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Ingenico

POS & Business Software

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

First Card Payments

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

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

BitPay

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Trustly

Bank / A2A Payments

B-

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, on its own account, the largest pay-by-bank provider in the world by volume — a ranking no independent source confirms: 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.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.0

Spreedly

Gateway / Orchestration

B

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

Klarna

BNPL Network

B

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.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

Inovio Payments

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

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.

Pricing clarity

0.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.0

FastSpring

Merchant of Record

B+

FastSpring is a merchant of record for software, SaaS, games and digital products, founded in Santa Barbara in 2005 and trading as Bright Market, LLC. It becomes the legal seller of your product, which means it — not you — owns the payment relationship, the sales tax and VAT obligation, the fraud loss and the chargeback. Its own site claims more than 3,200 customers, over $2 billion in transactions a year, 200-plus regions, 35-plus currencies and 21-plus languages. It holds a BBB A- and is twenty-one years old, both unusual in this category. It publishes no rates.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

TouchBistro

POS & Business Software

C+

TouchBistro is an iPad-based restaurant point of sale system from Toronto, used by more than 16,000 restaurants and acquired by Constellation Software's Harris division in July 2026. Operators generally like the software. What sinks the grade is the commercial relationship: annual agreements that auto-renew, an F rating with the Better Business Bureau after dozens of unanswered complaints, and a cancellation process that generates more grievances than any other aspect of the product.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

SignaPay

ISO

B-

SignaPay is an independent sales organization in Irving, Texas, best known for PayLo, its dual-pricing program that shows a cash price and a card price at the point of sale so the card cost lands on the customer who chose to pay by card. It has held BBB accreditation since 2008 and an A+ rating, but it publishes no rates, and third-party reviewers consistently describe three-year agreements with auto-renewal and an early termination fee.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

SecureGlobalPay

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

SecureGlobalPay is a Texas-based merchant account provider specialising in high-risk and hard-to-place businesses — firearms, tobacco and vape, adult, dating, supplements, travel, ticketing, credit repair and collections — across the US, Canada, the EU and the UK. Its BBB record is clean, and it advertises interchange-plus pricing with no long-term contract, but it publishes no actual rates and its independent review footprint is too thin to corroborate much.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.0

PayTrace

Gateway / Orchestration

B

PayTrace is a Spokane-area payment gateway built for businesses that sell to other businesses and to government. Its differentiator is automatic Level 2 and Level 3 data capture, which can qualify commercial and purchasing card transactions for materially lower interchange. It publishes no rate card, and the processing rate you actually pay is set by whichever merchant services provider sells you the account.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Celero Commerce

ISO

C+

Celero Commerce is a Tennessee payment and business-software company that grew quickly by acquisition and was itself acquired by Deluxe for $625 million in a deal that closed on 31 July 2026. It has genuine scale — Deluxe put the acquired book at more than 55,000 merchant relationships and 130 bank partners — but the Better Business Bureau currently declines to issue it a rating and has flagged a pattern of complaints, and merchants report cancellation fees the company does not publish.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.0

REPAY

Payfac / Aggregator

B

A vertical payments company you probably meet through your software, not through a salesperson. REPAY — legally M & A Ventures, LLC doing business as REPAY, and known in full as Realtime Electronic Payments — was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Atlanta. It is publicly traded as RPAY and reported full-year 2025 revenue of $309.3 million, split between a Consumer Payments segment at $285.9 million and a Business Payments segment at $48.4 million, with 2026 guidance of $340 to $346 million. Its business is embedding payment acceptance and vendor disbursement inside the software that particular industries already run: consumer lenders, auto dealers and their finance arms, credit unions, receivables management firms, municipalities, healthcare, HOA and property management. The distinctive products are the ones a general processor does not build — Instant Funding, which pushes loan proceeds to a borrower's debit card in real time through Visa Direct, and an AP automation network REPAY says exceeded 602,000 suppliers at the end of 2025. What it does not do is publish a price or serve a walk-up merchant.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

NCR Voyix

POS & Business Software

B-

The retail and restaurant half of the old NCR. NCR Corporation — founded in 1884 as the National Cash Register Company — renamed itself NCR Voyix in October 2023 when it spun off its ATM business as NCR Atleos, and what remains is a unified commerce platform: Aloha and Counterpoint point of sale, self-checkout, and Voyix Pay processing sold alongside them. The scale is real. NCR Voyix reported 80,000 platform sites and more than 8,500 payment sites at the end of 2025, $1.7 billion of annual recurring revenue, and full-year Software and Services revenue of $1,986 million. The problem is the paper you sign. The published US merchant agreement sets a 36-month initial term that auto-renews for 12-month periods unless you give 60 days' notice, makes cancellation during the term immediately payable for every remaining month, and reserves an annual price increase of CPI plus 5% — with a contractual floor of 5% — that applies during the initial term as well as after it. Buy the platform if the platform is what you need, and negotiate the term before you sign anything.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.0

Leap Payments

ISO

B-

A sales organisation with an unusually good promise and an unusually poor paper trail. Leap Payments sells interchange-plus pricing to every customer and attaches a Lifetime Rate Lock: its own processing, authorization and monthly account fees will not rise for the life of the account, with interchange itself passing through at cost in both directions. That is a better structure than most small merchants are offered, and the company has real standing behind it — it was named the number one MSP/ISO in Elavon's Western Region for merchant activations at Elavon's 2019 conference. The trouble is that you cannot verify anything else. No rate, no markup, no monthly fee and no contract term is published. Sources disagree on whether the agreement is month-to-month with no early termination fee or a three-year term with a $295 exit fee. Its own site says it is a sales office for WorldPay, an FIS Global company — a description stale on two counts by 2026 — while independent reviewers describe it as a registered ISO and MSP of Elavon. And the Better Business Bureau, which the company's marketing history leans on, currently shows no rating at all.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

CSG Forte

Platform / Acquirer

B

A biller-focused processor that does ACH properly. Forte Payment Systems was founded in Texas in 1998 and acquired by CSG Systems International on 1 October 2018, becoming CSG Forte; CSG itself was taken private by NEC's Netcracker subsidiary on 14 May 2026, so the parent above this business changed hands very recently. The company says it handles 260 million transactions and more than $195 billion a year for roughly 175,000 merchants, and it sells almost entirely into recurring-billing verticals — utilities, government, insurance, healthcare, property management, telecoms. Two things set it apart. It is a registered acquirer as well as a gateway, operating as an Elavon Payments MSP and a Registered MSP/ISO of Elavon, Inc., Georgia, and it publishes unusually honest documentation of how ACH actually settles, including the awkward fact that standard funding can take up to six business days. Against that, no rates are published, the standard agreement runs three years, and the BBB file shows unanswered complaints and merchants struggling to stop billing after cancellation.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Bankful

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

A high-risk-friendly gateway that does the one thing almost nobody in high risk does: it publishes its prices. Bankful sells gateway plans off a public page — $0 a month with a $50 monthly minimum and $0.15 a transaction at the bottom, $495 a month and $0.08 a transaction at the top — and lists the add-on costs alongside them, down to $38 per Ethoca alert and $1.60 per eCheck authentication. It is an officially supported third-party gateway for WooCommerce and works with BigCommerce, Wix, Ecwid and Shopify, and it accepts categories those platforms' own processors decline: CBD, nutraceuticals, firearms, tobacco, adult, dating, bail bonds and tech support. The reservations are substantial and you should weigh them properly. The card processing rate — the number that actually determines your cost — is not published, only the gateway fee on top of it. The independent record is polarised: an A+ Better Business Bureau file, accredited since 2020, against a 2.1 Trustpilot score where 91% of eleven reviews are one star. And Bankful shares a suite address and a co-founder with eMerchantBroker, so treat the two as one commercial relationship rather than two quotes.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Epos Now

POS & Business Software

B-

A cloud point-of-sale system founded in Norwich, England in 2011 by Jacyn Heavens, now operating in the US from an Orlando office and claiming more than 80,000 business locations across 70-plus countries. The software is well liked — 26,281 Trustpilot reviews average 4.3, and the day-to-day complaints are few. The problems are all at the edges of the relationship: nothing about software pricing is published on the US site, the hardware bundle is advertised behind a discount countdown that never actually runs out, no two independent reviewers describe the same contract length, and the recurring theme in the US complaint record is how hard it is to get out. BBB lists 114 complaints in three years against an A+ accredited profile. Good product, aggressive commercial packaging — get the term and the monthly cost in writing before you sign anything.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

emerchantpay

Platform / Acquirer

B

A London-headquartered payment service provider and acquirer, founded in 2002 by its current chief executive Jonas Reynisson, that is unusual in this market for owning both halves of the stack. emerchantpay holds its own FCA authorisation as an electronic money institution (Reg. No. 900778), has been a principal member of Visa Europe and Mastercard since 2012, launched its own gateway in 2013 and its own acquiring division in 2014, and runs card-present alongside online and mobile. It underwrites verticals most acquirers decline — gaming, forex, travel, subscriptions — which makes it a genuine option for merchants who have been turned down elsewhere, without being a broker reselling somebody else's appetite for risk. The catch is the usual one: no published pricing, quotes come from sales after underwriting, and high-risk accounts should expect a rolling reserve. Its US arm is in Boca Raton, but its licensing and scheme membership are European, so establish which entity is boarding you.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

Dwolla

Bank / A2A Payments

B-

An API for moving money between US bank accounts, founded in Des Moines in 2008 and one of the earliest companies to make ACH programmable. Dwolla does not touch cards at all: it does standard ACH, Same Day ACH, and instant payments over the RTP network and FedNow, behind a single integration. That is a genuinely useful thing to be able to buy, and Dwolla has been doing it longer than almost anyone. Two things should temper the enthusiasm. It no longer publishes any pricing — the pricing page now says only that terms are tailored to volume, rails and integration — and in May 2026 Dwolla was acquired by NMI, which is folding its capabilities into NMI's embedded payments platform. NMI says it will keep supporting existing Dwolla customers; neither company has said whether the Dwolla brand and product survive the integration. Build on it if bank-to-bank money movement is your requirement, but ask about the roadmap in writing.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

CardConnect

ISO

C+

A Fiserv-owned merchant services brand built around the CardPointe platform, sold almost entirely through independent sales agents and ISOs. The technology is capable — CardPointe covers in-store, online, mobile and virtual terminal, CardSecure handles tokenisation and point-to-point encryption, and Clover hardware comes with it. The commercial record is the problem. CardConnect paid $7.65 million in 2021 to settle a class action covering 110,875 merchants who said it charged fees their agreements never named, and in July 2024 a Pennsylvania medical practice filed a fresh proposed class action alleging the same conduct had resumed, citing a $199.99 annual compliance fee, a $215 security bundle fee and a $200 annual membership fee introduced in February 2024. Nothing about pricing is published, terms vary by whichever agent sells to you, and the recurring complaint on every public channel is how hard it is to leave.

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Amazon Pay

Payfac / Aggregator

B

Amazon's express checkout button for other people's websites. Amazon's merchant payments business dates to the Amazon Flexible Payments Service beta in August 2007; the product merchants use today launched as Login and Pay with Amazon on 8 October 2013 and took the Amazon Pay name later. A shopper clicks it, signs in with the Amazon account they already have, and pays with a card and address Amazon already holds. Pricing is published and ordinary — 2.9% plus a $0.30 authorization fee on US domestic transactions, 3.9% plus $0.30 when the card was issued abroad, no monthly fee and no setup fee — and Express Payout will fund a US bank account within 24 hours including weekends, for free. What Amazon Pay is not is a merchant account. It is online-only, it has no card-present product, its acceptable use policy bans a long list of categories outright including CBD regardless of state law, and it only ever captures the slice of your checkout that Amazon shoppers choose. Treat it as a second button next to your real processor, not as a replacement for one.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

4.5

Worldline

Platform / Acquirer

B-

Europe's largest listed payments company and, since March 2026, one that no longer sells to North American merchants at all — it sold its North American subsidiaries, including Bambora North America, to Shift4. What remains is a Paris-headquartered acquirer and processor serving roughly 1.2 million merchants and financial institutions across Europe with about 13,400 staff. The last two years have been brutal: a June 2025 investigative report accused it of knowingly processing for prohibited and high-risk clients, Belgian prosecutors opened a money-laundering probe into its local unit, the shares fell more than 40%, and S&P cut the credit rating to junk in August 2025. The underlying acquiring business is real and licensed; the governance record and the balance sheet are why this is not a B.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.0

TailoredPay

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

A small Miami high-risk merchant account broker founded in 2019, whose whole proposition is placing US businesses that ordinary acquirers decline — adult, CBD, vape, lending, dating, telemedicine, travel, dropshipping and, more recently, prop trading firms. It publishes a real address, a named list of over a hundred verticals, gateway integrations with Authorize.net and NMI, and — unusually for this corner of the market — some indicative pricing on its own blog. What it does not have is much of a public record: 42 Trustpilot reviews, every single one of them five stars, no BBB profile we could find, and no named acquiring banks. The absence of complaints is not the same as evidence of good outcomes, and a spotless rating on a small sample deserves scepticism rather than credit.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Newtek Payments (NewtekOne)

ISO

B-

The payments arm of NewtekOne, a Nasdaq-listed financial holding company that became a bank in January 2023 by acquiring National Bank of New York City and renaming it Newtek Bank, N.A. That makes it unusual among mid-market processors: the same company can hold your deposits, write your SBA loan, run your payroll, sell you insurance and process your cards. The payments business is real but not growing — $22.3 million of processing revenue in the first half of 2026, down from $24.0 million a year earlier — and it publishes no rates at all. The recurring merchant complaint is undisclosed fees and difficulty cancelling, and there is an old but serious regulatory matter on the record: a 2015 FTC settlement under which the Newtek processing entity paid $1.7 million over payments it handled for a robocall scheme.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Leaders Merchant Services

ISO

C+

A California merchant services reseller that is no longer an independent company: its own website footer reads 'Paysafe Payment Processing Solutions, LLC dba Leaders Merchant Services', the end point of a chain that ran from iPayment's 2017 acquisition to Paysafe's purchase of iPayment in June 2018. It sells through independent agents, quotes rates only after a sales call, and — according to consistent third-party reporting — puts merchants on three-year contracts that auto-renew and carry an early termination fee in the $250–$350 range. It holds an A+ from the BBB and is accredited there, but the customer-facing record is the opposite: 1.3 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 49 reviews, two-thirds of them one star, with the same three complaints repeating — quoted rates that did not match the contract, fees that appeared without warning, and accounts that kept billing after the merchant believed they had cancelled.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.0

Cybersource

Gateway / Orchestration

B

Visa's enterprise payment gateway, founded in 1994 in Silicon Valley and bought by Visa for about $2 billion in 2010. It is one of the largest gateways in the world — Cybersource's own marketing claims 14.3 billion transactions a year, connections to more than 200 acquirers and processors across 160-plus countries, and 99.999% uptime — and its Decision Manager fraud engine is genuinely among the best-regarded in the industry. What it does not do is publish a single price. Cybersource has no public rate card, no published gateway fee and no self-serve signup; every quote comes through a sales conversation or through whichever acquirer resells it to you. For a large merchant with a payments team that is normal. For anyone smaller, it is the main reason to look at its sister brand Authorize.net instead.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

2.5

Xplor Pay

Platform / Acquirer

B

The US payments arm of Xplor Technologies, and the company you knew as Clearent until it dropped the name in July 2025. It is a straightforward mid-market acquirer with two things going for it that most of its peers do not have: interchange-plus is the default rather than the upsell, and next-day funding runs on an 11:00 p.m. Eastern cut-off, which is about as late as this industry gets. The trade-offs are the ordinary ISO ones — a three-year term and a per-location early termination fee reported at $395, a PCI non-compliance charge around $25 a month, and an annual fee that steps up after year one. Nothing here is published by the company, which is the recurring frustration.

Payroc

ISO

B

A Chicago-area merchant acquirer that has spent twenty years buying its way to scale — seventeen-plus acquisitions since 2016, most recently BlueSnap in October 2025 — and now reports around $125 billion of annual volume across roughly 190,000 clients in the US, Canada, the Caribbean, the UK and the EU. It runs its own gateway, its own POS line and its own boarding and reporting APIs, which makes it a credible one-integration partner for software platforms and ISOs. What it does not do is publish a price. Payroc sells almost entirely through commission-paid agents and referral partners, so the rate, the term and the cancellation fee you get are set by whoever signs you, and the most consistent merchant complaint is being told there was no early termination fee and then being billed several hundred dollars for one.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

PAYARC

ISO

B-

A Greenwich, Connecticut processor founded in 2016 that has grown quickly by selling through agents and software platforms, and by building an unusual amount of AI tooling into its partner stack. It is more forthcoming than most about mechanics — its own partner documentation publishes a default fee schedule, chargeback pricing that differs for restricted and high-risk merchants, and the card-network high-risk registration costs that most processors let merchants discover on a statement. That transparency sits awkwardly next to its public record: a Trustpilot score of 1.4 from 46 reviews, sharply polarised, with recurring accounts of suspended accounts, withheld funds, billing after cancellation and three-year terms merchants say they did not agree to.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Nadapayments

ISO

B-

A surcharging specialist that does one thing and publishes exactly what it costs: your customer pays a 3.00% surcharge when they use a credit card, you pay nothing, and you pay 1.50% + 25¢ when they use a debit card, plus $35 a month for the terminal. That is the entire price list, on the website, with no sales call — which in this industry is close to unheard of. It sells hardest into dental and veterinary practices and reports processing over $1 billion a year. What holds it back is everything around the pricing: no BBB profile at all, three Trustpilot reviews and all of them hostile, no published address or founding year, and public pages that contradict each other about where surcharging is even lawful.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

2.5

Ease of use

4.0

Gravity Payments

ISO

B+

A Seattle merchant services company founded in 2004, best known outside the industry for setting a $70,000 minimum salary in 2015, and better known inside it for doing two unfashionable things well: publishing a flat rate on its own website, and showing interchange and assessments at cost with its own markup as a separate line on the statement. Its formal complaint record is the cleanest of any provider we have reviewed at this size — one BBB complaint in three years against an A+ rating held since 2005. The two things to weigh against that are a markup that independent auditors have found higher than competing quotes, and a 2025 data breach at a third-party vendor that exposed Social Security numbers and banking details for 22,278 people and is now the subject of a proposed class action.

Pricing clarity

4.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Verifone

Platform / Acquirer

C+

The terminal company that became a payments company. Verifone has been making card-reading hardware since 1981 and is the device behind a very large share of the world's checkout counters, but the merchant-facing business it has assembled around that hardware — Verifone Payments acquiring, plus the 2Checkout platform it bought in 2020 — is a much weaker story. Its US BBB profile carries an F for failing to answer complaints, its own .com Trustpilot page sits at 1.5 out of 5, and no acquiring rate is published anywhere. The only prices Verifone publishes are 2Checkout's, and those are merchant-of-record rates for selling software, not merchant-account rates.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

2.5

Tilled

Payfac / Aggregator

B

A Boulder, Colorado company that sells payments infrastructure to software companies rather than merchant accounts to businesses. Tilled claims to have coined the term PayFac-as-a-Service: a software vendor gets the economics of being a payment facilitator — a share of the processing revenue on every transaction its customers make — without taking on the registration, underwriting and compliance burden of actually becoming one. It is one of the very few companies in this catalogue that publishes its own prices in public, which is the main reason it grades where it does.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Priority Commerce

ISO

B-

A genuinely large US payments and banking company that most merchants have never heard of, because for twenty years it sold almost entirely through ISOs and software partners rather than under its own name. Founded in Georgia in 2005 as Priority Payment Systems, it listed on NASDAQ as PRTH in 2018 and now reports 1.8 million customer accounts and over $150 billion of annual volume. It publishes no rates, no contract length and no termination fee, and its BBB complaint file — 37 in three years, 21 of them closed in the last twelve months — is dominated by billing that continued after merchants believed they had cancelled.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Fortis

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

An embedded-payments specialist that sells to software platforms first and merchants second. Fortis plugs card acceptance into ERP and business software — Acumatica, Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage — and is registered as both a payment facilitator and an ISO for several banks, including KeyBank and Fifth Third. It took a growth recapitalisation from Audax Private Equity alongside existing investor Lovell Minnick in March 2025. It publishes no pricing at all, and the third-party sources describing its contract terms flatly contradict each other, which is the single most important thing to know before you sign.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

DirectPayNet

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

A small high-risk merchant account brokerage aimed squarely at online sellers — supplements, coaching, subscriptions, dropshipping, digital products, high-ticket offers — that mainstream processors decline. It does not underwrite or process anything itself; it places you with acquiring banks and negotiates your terms, then works on the things that actually keep a high-risk account alive: chargeback prevention through Ethoca and Verifi, approval-rate optimisation, backup MIDs and reserve terms. Unusually for the sector, it publishes a genuine fee-range guide. Unusually badly, it publishes no corporate address and has no meaningful independent review record at all.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Rapyd

Platform / Acquirer

B-

A London-headquartered, Israeli-founded fintech-as-a-service platform that sells collection, payouts and multi-currency accounts through one API. Its 2025 purchase of PayU's Latin America and Africa business for $610 million gave it direct local acquiring in six Latin American countries plus Nigeria and South Africa — genuinely hard-to-reach markets. It is built for platforms and marketplaces rather than small merchants, publishes almost no acquiring pricing, and its public merchant reviews are poor.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.0

Paddle

Merchant of Record

B

A London merchant of record for software, SaaS and AI companies, founded in 2012 and used by more than 6,000 digital product businesses by its own July 2025 count. It publishes one flat price — 5% + 50¢ — and in exchange becomes the legal seller of your product, taking on global sales tax and VAT registration, filing and liability. That is a real transfer of risk, and it is expensive: roughly double a card processor's rate, paid out once a month rather than daily.

Pricing clarity

4.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

Merchant One

ISO

C+

A Miami Beach independent sales organization, incorporated in 2002 and bought by Fiserv in December 2022 for about $300 million — a fact almost no review of it mentions, and one that undercuts its own "we're not a broker or middleman" claim. It publishes headline rates, which is rare for an ISO, but they are qualified-tier rates on a tiered plan, and its Trustpilot score of 4.9 and its BBB customer-review average of 1.02 across 56 reviews describe two different companies.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.5

Humboldt Merchant Services

ISO

B-

One of the oldest specialty merchant account providers in the United States — writing accounts for adult, CBD, firearms, credit repair, online pharmacy, gambling, telemedicine and travel since the early 1990s. It holds a BBB A+ and has been accredited since 2011, with 15 complaints in the last three years — low for this segment, but not the near-empty file some reviews suggest, and almost all of them are about reserve funds being held. Three things to know: it publishes no pricing at all, it holds reserves that merchants say run into six figures, and it is now a North brand, so a quote from Humboldt and a quote from North American Bancard are not two independent quotes.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Heartland Payment Systems

Platform / Acquirer

B-

A large US small-business processor founded in 1997, bought by Global Payments for $4.3 billion in 2016 and now openly in the middle of being retired as a brand — Global Payments' own page is headed "Heartland Payment Systems is now Global Payments." It still sells under the Heartland name at heartland.us, still runs the Merchant Bill of Rights it invented, and still publishes no pricing. Signing today means signing with a brand that is being folded away around you.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Kurv (formerly Electronic Merchant Systems)

ISO

C+

A November 2025 rebrand of Electronic Merchant Systems, a Cleveland processor trading since 1988 and now owned by private equity. The new brand publishes real sample rates and funds next business day, which is progress. The complaint record underneath it has not reset, and the catches are in the footnotes rather than the headline.

SpotOn

POS & Business Software

B-

A restaurant-first point-of-sale and payments platform founded in 2017, with published plan rates, next-morning funding and unusually well-regarded support. The catch is the contract: a two-year minimum on its headline plan, a mid-2026 rate increase applied to existing merchants, and cancellation terms it does not publish.

SMB Global

Agent Office / Reseller

C+

A small Utah high-risk shop that places domestic and offshore merchant accounts for hard-to-approve verticals. Reviewers who have dealt with it speak well of it, but almost nothing about the company is verifiable from primary sources — no rates, no contract terms, no BBB profile, no About page and no independent reviews at all.

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.0

Segpay

Merchant of Record

B

A South Florida high-risk biller founded in 2005, registered with Visa as an internet payment service provider and with Mastercard as a payment facilitator, serving adult, dating, subscription and content merchants across the US, EU, UK and Australia. It publishes its settlement terms in detail and its rates not at all.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

PayJunction

ISO

B+

A Santa Barbara ISO that has been processing since 2000, sells month-to-month with no cancellation fee, and has zero complaints on file with the BBB. The reservation is pricing: its published numbers are all 'as low as', and third-party accounts of its monthly fee flatly contradict each other.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.5

Mollie

Payfac / Aggregator

B+

One of Europe's largest independent payment service providers, serving more than 250,000 businesses from Amsterdam and authorised by the Dutch central bank as an electronic money institution. It publishes its full price list, which almost nobody at its scale does, and it is in the middle of absorbing GoCardless in a €1.05 billion deal. It processes for Europe and the UK only, and account freezes are the recurring complaint.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.5

pmtbox (formerly National Processing)

ISO

B-

A 2007-vintage Utah merchant services provider that spent years as one of the better-regarded small-business ISOs, rebranded to pmtbox, raised $15 million in 2026, and repositioned around enterprise e-commerce. The track record is real; the offering a small merchant would be buying today is much less clear than it was.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

3.5

Instabill

Agent Office / Reseller

C+

A small New Hampshire high-risk shop that places merchant accounts with domestic and offshore banks for verticals mainstream acquirers refuse. It charges no application fee and is candid about rolling reserves — but it publishes no rates, is not BBB-accredited or rated, and leaves almost no verifiable public trail.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

3.0

GoDaddy Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

B

GoDaddy's in-house processor, built on the Poynt technology it bought in 2020. Flat published rates, no monthly fee and next-business-day payouts make it a genuinely competitive small-business option — provided you are willing to run your commerce inside GoDaddy's ecosystem.

GoCardless

Bank / A2A Payments

B

A bank-payments specialist built for recurring billing. GoCardless collects by ACH and other direct debit schemes rather than by card, with published, capped per-transaction pricing — but it processes no card payments at all, and merchant complaints about account freezes and slow support are persistent.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

4.0

CCBill

Merchant of Record

B-

One of the longest-running high-risk processors in the United States, operating since 1998 and built around subscription billing for adult, dating, streaming and creator platforms. It will underwrite what almost nobody else will — but it publishes no rates, and its contract terms deserve a careful read.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Rainforest

Payfac / Aggregator

B

An Atlanta payfac-as-a-service provider that publishes its entire buy-rate card in public — 0.30% and $0.30 falling to 0.20% and $0.20 at volume, with no revenue share — for software platforms embedding payments. Not a merchant account, and only four years old.

Host Merchant Services

ISO

B+

A Delaware ISO that publishes real interchange-plus margins — 0.25% and $0.10 retail, 0.20% and $0.09 restaurant, 0.35% and $0.10 e-commerce — on month-to-month terms with no termination fee, an A+ BBB record since 2011 and 4.6 on Trustpilot.

BlueSnap

Platform / Acquirer

C+

A capable global orchestration platform — published card rates in a handful of countries, local acquiring in 50 more, one integration for over 200 regions — carrying a 2024 FTC settlement for processing payments for a known scam, and now owned by Payroc.

Pricing clarity

2.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

3.5

Finix

Payfac / Aggregator

B

A San Francisco processor that charges a monthly subscription — from $250 — and takes zero markup on interchange, billing a flat $0.08 or $0.15 per transaction instead. Excellent economics above roughly $1m a year, wrong below it, and with a public track record still too thin to lean on.

Pricing clarity

4.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Easy Pay Direct

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

An Austin high-risk specialist that publishes flat rates — 2.69% + $0.36 online, 1.59% + $0.19 swiped — and routes merchants across 30+ banking partners so one declined account does not stop the business. Its own marketing overstates its Trustpilot score, and its BBB rating is D- for unanswered complaints.

Pricing clarity

3.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Dharma Merchant Services

ISO

A-

A small, long-running ISO that publishes its entire interchange-plus margin, charges $20 a month, and imposes no contract and no early termination fee. The catch is fit, not conduct: it declines high-risk verticals, is uneconomic below a few thousand dollars a month, and supports merchants only during business hours.

Pricing clarity

5.0

Feature set

3.0

Ease of use

4.0

SumUp

Payfac / Aggregator

B+

A pay-as-you-go card reader and POS provider with flat published rates, no monthly fee and no contract. Strong for small and mobile sellers; the recurring complaint is account freezes and held funds with slow resolution.

North (North American Bancard)

Platform / Acquirer

C+

One of the largest privately held US acquirers, rebranded from North American Bancard in 2024 — a rebrand that also reset its public review record. It publishes POS rates and says it does not require a long-term contract, but reviewers who have read its traditional merchant agreement report a three-year term with a liquidated-damages termination clause.

eMerchantBroker

ISO

B

A long-established California high-risk specialist with an A+ BBB rating, accreditation since 2012 and an unusually light complaint record. The trade-offs are tiered, quote-only pricing at the expensive end of the market and multi-year contracts with early termination fees up to $595.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Worldpay

Platform / Acquirer

C+

One of the largest acquirers in the world, bought by Global Payments in January 2026 and now being folded into that brand. Enormous reach, but small merchants still get a three-year contract, an auto-renewal clause and pricing that is never published.

Soar Payments

ISO

B

A Texas high-risk specialist with fast underwriting, an A+ BBB rating and an unusually clean complaint record. The catch is a quote-only rate card and a $495 early termination fee on high-risk agreements.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

3.5

Ease of use

4.0

Airwallex

Payfac / Aggregator

B

A global business account and payment platform with published rates, no lock-in contract and unusually cheap FX. Strong for cross-border sellers; weaker as a plain domestic card processor, and not an option for high-risk merchants.

Durango Merchant Services

ISO

B+

Durango is a veteran, boutique high-risk payment processing specialist that serves as a trusted lifeline for businesses rejected by mainstream processors, but lacks enough reviews to make a confident assessment on the quality of the services.

Nuvei

Platform / Acquirer

B

Nuvei is a Montreal-based global payment technology company founded in 2003 that offers 700+ payment methods across 200+ markets and deep vertical expertise in iGaming, fintech, and high-risk sectors — but carries meaningful risks around contract terms, pricing transparency, and customer support quality.

Checkout.com

Platform / Acquirer

C+

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

3.0

Lightspeed

POS & Business Software

B+

Lightspeed Commerce is a global cloud-based POS and commerce platform that provides retail, restaurant, and ecommerce businesses with integrated payments, inventory management, analytics, and omnichannel selling tools.

PayKings

Agent Office / ResellerClaimed

A

PayKings is a specialized payment processor offering tailored solutions for high-risk industries with a strong emphasis on fraud prevention.

Shift4

Platform / Acquirer

B+

Shift4 Payments is a full-service payment processor and POS provider specializing in integrated commerce solutions for restaurants, hospitality, retail, and enterprise merchants.

Moneris

Platform / Acquirer

B-

Moneris is Canada’s largest payment processor, providing point-of-sale systems, ecommerce payment gateways, and mobile payment solutions for businesses across Canada through a joint venture owned by Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal.

Bank of America Merchant Services

Platform / Acquirer

C+

Bank of America Merchant Services is a large, bank-integrated payment processing solution ideal for existing BofA business checking customers who value brand stability, seamless funding, and broad payment acceptance though it lags behind fintech competitors on pricing transparency, modern integrations, and third-party review scores.

Wells Fargo Merchant Services

Platform / Acquirer

C+

Wells Fargo Merchant Services is a division of one of the largest U.S. banks, offering credit and debit card processing, Clover POS systems, and e-commerce solutions to small and medium-sized businesses.

Chase Payment Solutions and Merchant Services

Platform / Acquirer

B

Chase Payment Solutions is the merchant services arm of the #1 US bank, offering small and mid-sized businesses a deeply integrated combination of payment processing, same-day deposits, and banking tools. They're backed by the trust and scale of JPMorgan Chase but with flat-rate fees that may not suit high-volume merchants.

Toast POS

POS & Business Software

B

Toast POS is the leading all-in-one cloud-based restaurant management platform, purpose-built for the food service industry with deep features for ordering, payments, payroll, and analytics, but comes with restrictive multi-year contracts, mandatory payment processor lock-in, and a history of transparency controversies.

WooPayments (Automattic)

Payfac / Aggregator

B

WooPayments is the official, Stripe-powered payment solution built exclusively for WooCommerce stores, offering no monthly fees and deep dashboard integration, but plagued by account suspension issues and inconsistent customer support that undermine trust for serious merchants.

Fiserv (Carat)

Platform / Acquirer

B-

Carat from Fiserv is an enterprise-grade global commerce platform that orchestrates omnichannel payments, data intelligence, and customer experience solutions for the world's largest businesses, but hampered by opaque pricing, complex contracting, and a widespread customer service reputation that does not match its technological ambitions.

Elavon

Platform / Acquirer

C-

Elavon is one of the world's largest payment processors, serving over 2 million merchant locations across 36 countries offering a comprehensive suite of enterprise payment solutions, but widely criticized by small and mid-size merchants.

Global Payments

Platform / Acquirer

C

Global Payments Inc. is a Fortune 500 payments technology behemoth, processing trillions of dollars annually across 38 countries, offering massive scale and enterprise capabilities, but consistently criticized by small and mid-size merchants for opaque pricing, hidden fees, rigid contracts, poor customer support, and a significant history of legal actions.

Helcim

Payfac / Aggregator

A-

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.

Payment Depot

ISO

C+

Payment Depot, now operating as "Payment Depot by Stax," is a California-based merchant services provider founded in 2013 that pioneered the subscription/interchange-plus pricing model for small businesses, but has experienced significant customer service and transparency issues since its 2021 acquisition by Stax.

Stax

ISO

B

Stax is a payments technology company founded in 2014 that partners with SaaS companies, ISOs, and SMBs to enable flexible, multi-channel payment processing and invoicing solutions, claiming a distinctive subscription-based pricing model with 0% interchange markup.

CARDZ3N

Agent Office / Reseller

B-

CARDZ3N is a global payment processing platform that supports multi-channel payments, including credit cards, ACH, crypto, and BNPL, tailored to both standard and high-risk merchants.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

High Risk Pay

Agent Office / Reseller

C

High Risk Pay is a merchant account provider specializing in high-risk merchant services and payment processing solutions including credit card and ACH acceptance for businesses that struggle with traditional payment processors.

Paysafe

Platform / Acquirer

C-

Paysafe is a global payments technology platform that provides merchants and consumers with payment processing, digital wallet services, alternative payment methods, and secure transaction infrastructure.

EBizCharge

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

EBizCharge is an embedded payment gateway and integrated merchant services platform that simplifies credit card, debit card, and ACH payment processing directly inside accounting, ERP, CRM, and ecommerce systems.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

3.0

Akurateco

Gateway / Orchestration

B+

Akurateco is a white-label PCI DSS-compliant payment orchestration platform that enables businesses and PSPs to deploy advanced payment infrastructure and unify multiple payment methods globally.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

4.0

Maverick Payments

ISO

B+

Maverick Payments is a long-established payment processing provider offering a comprehensive suite of payment solutions for merchants, partners, and developers, though its reputation is mixed due to varied customer experiences.

Corepay

ISO

B

Corepay is a payment processor that specializes in tailored merchant accounts for high-risk industries with global service and a focus on customer support.

Payoneer

Payfac / Aggregator

B-

Payoneer is a global fintech platform that enables businesses, freelancers, and marketplaces to send and receive cross-border payments, manage multi-currency funds, and scale internationally.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

4.0

Shopify Payments

Payfac / Aggregator

A-

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.

Clover

POS & Business Software

B

Clover is a widely used, all-in-one POS platform (hardware + software + app marketplace) favored by small and medium retailers and restaurants and backed by Fiserv, offering broad functionality but with real-world variability in support and reseller pricing.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

4.0

Adyen

Platform / Acquirer

A-

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.

PayPal

Payfac / Aggregator

A-

PayPal is a global, feature-rich digital payments platform (consumer wallet + merchant services) with extensive integrations and brand reach. It is trusted by many businesses but criticized in public reviews for dispute handling and account-hold practices.

Braintree (PayPal Enterprise Payments)

Payfac / Aggregator

A-

Braintree is a full-featured, globally-capable payment gateway solution (online + mobile) backed by PayPal, offering robust APIs, developer tooling, and enterprise-class features for merchants. Primarily deals in mobile and web payment systems.

Authorize.net

Gateway / Orchestration

A-

Authorize.Net is a mature, Visa-owned payment gateway that offers robust, developer-friendly payment tools, strong fraud controls, and wide platform integrations. Pricing and merchant-account terms that vary depending on whether you use Authorize.Net’s all-in-one plan or attach your own processor.

Pricing clarity

3.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

4.0

NMI (Network Merchants Inc)

Gateway / Orchestration

B-

NMI (Network Merchants, Inc.) is a mature, ISO/ISV-focused embedded-payments gateway and enablement platform with broad developer tooling and enterprise integrations, but merchant experiences can vary depending on the partner/acquirer relationship.

Zen Payments

Agent Office / ResellerClaimed

A-

Zen Payments is known for quick setup of merchant accounts and accepting businesses that mainstream providers turn away. Businesses should familiarize themselves with the terms of their contract to avoid disruptions.

Payment Cloud

Agent Office / Reseller

B+

A well-run high-risk merchant services shop with unusually good service ratings and no junk fees — but since its 2024 acquisition it is a Kurv company, and Kurv now routes almost everything through its own platform, which is not the bank-agnostic brokerage the brand's reputation was built on.

Pricing clarity

3.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

Stripe

Payfac / Aggregator

A

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.

Square

POS & Business Software

A

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.