Payment Processor Reviews

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Checkout.com

Platform / Acquirer

C+

Pricing clarity

1.0

Feature set

5.0

Ease of use

3.0

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.

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.

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.

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.