Gravity Payments Review

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.

Estimated annual cost at three realistic processing volumes, using Gravity Payments’s published online rate plus monthly fees. Real costs vary with average transaction size, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.

The processor that puts a number on its website

Almost every company in this industry refuses to publish a price. Gravity Payments does: 2.5% plus ten cents on qualified in-person transactions, on its own pricing page, with an explicit note that software-integrated and card-not-present transactions may not qualify. The alternative is a customised interchange-plus plan. That is a small thing that turns out to be a large thing, because it means you can evaluate Gravity before you talk to anyone who is paid to sell it to you.

The transparency continues onto the statement, which is where it counts. Independent reviewers who have examined real Gravity bills confirm that interchange and card-network assessments are passed through at cost and the company's markup appears as its own line item. That is the only format in which a merchant can tell what their processor is actually earning, and most of this industry structurally avoids it.

Twenty years, one complaint

Gravity was founded in Seattle in 2004 — from a college dorm room, by Dan Price — opened its first office in Belltown in 2005 with six employees, expanded to Hawaii in 2007 and to Boise through the 2017 acquisition of Charge-it-Pro. It is a registered Independent Sales Organization of Citizens Bank, Pinnacle Bank dba Synovus and KeyBank.

Its formal complaint record is the best we have seen at this size. The BBB has accredited it since 2005 and rates it A+, with one complaint in the last three years — a billing dispute alleging a monthly statement fee continued after cancellation and that an account was not closed on request. One complaint in thirty-six months, against twenty years of accreditation, is not a marketing claim; it is an absence of a paper trail that would exist if the company were mistreating people at scale.

The support proposition is similarly concrete: 24/7, US-based, multilingual, with a stated average wait of 36 seconds. Support is where most merchant relationships actually break, and Gravity has built its reputation there rather than on rate.

Two things that keep it out of the A range

The first is price. Transparent is not the same as cheap. Reviewers who run competitive quoting processes report Gravity's markup running significantly higher than rival offers on the same volume. You will be able to see exactly what you are paying — and you may be paying more than you need to. Get a comparison quote anyway.

The second is a data breach, and it is serious. Washington State's Attorney General records an incident window of 12 to 23 August 2025, reported on 4 February 2026, exposing Social Security numbers, financial and banking information, full dates of birth, and usernames with passwords and security question answers — 677 Washington residents, out of 22,278 people in total across the state regulator filings. Gravity has attributed the cause to a vulnerability in a third-party vendor's software that allowed access to files in its customer relationship management system, says it completed its review of the affected files on 15 January 2026, and notified people on 4 February. A proposed class action followed in Washington federal court that month.

Two things about that are worth stating plainly. This was not card data — it was the identity and banking information that lets someone open credit in your name, which is worse. And roughly five and a half months elapsed between the incident window and the notifications, with the file review reported as completed on 15 January 2026 and letters going out on 4 February. The vendor's vulnerability was not Gravity's code, but the vendor was Gravity's choice, and the notification timeline was Gravity's.

The $70,000 story, and the part that usually gets left out

Gravity is famous outside the payments industry for one decision: in 2015 its founder raised the minimum salary for every employee to $70,000. The policy was real, it was maintained, and the company published a ten-year retrospective on it in 2025. It is a large part of why Gravity's Trustpilot page — three reviews, all five star — is about the company's employment practices rather than its processing.

The part that usually gets left out is that Dan Price resigned as CEO in August 2022 amid misconduct allegations and misdemeanour criminal charges, and was succeeded by Tammi Kroll, who had joined from Yahoo in 2015. Gravity's own history page still credits 'our founder, Dan Price' for the $70,000 decision and does not mention the resignation. If part of what draws you to a provider is its ethical reputation, you should have that history at the start rather than find it later.

Where it sits

For an independent, owner-operated business taking most of its money in person — a restaurant, a shop, a veterinary or dental practice, a trades business, a law firm — Gravity is a genuinely good option. You can see the rate before you call, you can read the statement afterwards, the support is real and in your time zone, and the twenty-year complaint record says the company does not routinely mistreat merchants.

The B+ rather than an A reflects three gaps: a markup that competitive quoting will often beat, a contract whose length and exit fee are not published by a company whose whole pitch is transparency, and a 2025 breach that exposed the most sensitive category of data there is. Ask for the contract terms and the funding schedule in writing, get one comparison quote, and if you were a merchant last August, check what notification you received.