PAY. Review

PAY. (pay.nl) is a Dutch payment service provider run by TinTel B.V., based in Enschede. It is licensed by De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) as a payment institution, and it says it became a principal member of Visa and Mastercard in October 2021. Merchants sign their agreement directly with PAY., and customer funds pass through its own escrow foundation before payout. As of October 2026 it publishes a full price list in euros, excluding VAT. Professional costs €35 a month and Business €89 a month. On Professional, EU consumer cards online cost €0.15 + 1.50%, and iDEAL | Wero costs €0.19 per payment. A Pioneer option drops the monthly fee and contract but adds €0.05 and 0.25% to every transaction. The platform covers more than 50 payment methods, in-store terminals, SoftPOS and more than 90 integrations, and accepts companies from most EU and EEA countries. The paid plans are less flexible than the price list suggests: a one-year initial term that renews indefinitely, three months' notice to leave, a minimum-billing clause if volume drops, and published fines for compliance breaches.

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

What PAY. is

PAY. is a Dutch payment service provider that handles online, in-store and self-service payments for businesses across Europe. Its legal entity, and the counterparty in its merchant agreement, is TinTel B.V., Chamber of Commerce number 24283498. DNB's register gives its business address as Hengelosestraat 113 in Enschede and its statutory seat as Spijkenisse, and the company also has an office in Diemen near Amsterdam. It trades as pay.nl, Pay.eu, Pay.be, Pay.lu and pay.it as well as PAY. The company says more than 35,000 businesses use it.

The company's own pages put its start at 2011. A credit-reference listing dates the TinTel B.V. legal entity to 1998, and a 2022 company press release describes the company's growth since the start of the century, so we do not state a single founding year. Olaf Kok and Kelvin Huizing are named as its founders. Kok was CEO until January 2019 and is now COO. Madelein Smit was appointed CEO in June 2025. We found no announced outside investor or acquisition of the company, but PAY. does not publish its shareholders, so we make no claim about who owns it beyond its founders' roles.

Why we list PAY. as a payment facilitator

PAY. holds the merchant relationship itself. You sign with TinTel B.V., which DNB licenses as a payment institution with payment-transaction acquiring among its permitted services, and customer funds are collected by its own escrow foundation, Stichting Derdengelden Pay.nl. In October 2021 PAY. announced that it had become a principal member of Visa and Mastercard and an acquirer-processor for both, adding to iDEAL, Bancontact, American Express, Alipay and WeChat Pay, and that it would keep using partner routes alongside its own. Its current general terms, though, read like a payment facilitator's contract. Their annex names Payone GmbH and American Express Payment Services Limited as the acquirers PAY. uses for card transactions, PAY. may switch acquirers and route transactions between them as it sees fit, and a merchant whose volume exceeds the card schemes' limits has to sign with an acquirer directly. You can also take payments as soon as you register, with checks afterwards. We therefore list PAY. as a payment facilitator, as we do Mollie and Unzer, which hold their own European licences and contract with merchants in a similar way. Some of your card traffic may be acquired by PAY. itself and some by a partner.

What it costs

PAY. publishes its full price list in euros. Its general terms say all fees exclude VAT. The English and Dutch pricing pages showed the same figures on 13 October 2026. There are three plans plus a no-commitment option:

• Pioneer: no monthly fee, no setup fee and no contract. You pay the Professional transaction rates plus €0.05 per transaction and 0.25% of turnover.
• Professional: €35 a month. Includes more than 50 payment methods, basic support by chat, email and phone, user permissions, unlimited trade names and sales locations, and Verify fraud screening.
• Business: €89 a month, for organisations with annual revenue from €2.5 million. Adds a personal account manager, a service-level agreement and lower transaction rates.
• Premium: priced on request, for organisations with revenue from €25 million in specialised industries.
• Online cards on Professional: €0.15 + 1.50% for EU consumer Visa and Mastercard, €0.15 + 2.80% for business cards and cards issued outside the EU, and €0.25 + 2.65% for American Express. Business pays €0.12 + 1.30% for EU consumer cards. IC++ pricing is available above €1 million in online card volume.
• Local methods on Professional: iDEAL | Wero €0.19, Bancontact €0.25, Twint €0.15 + 2.25%, BLIK €0.15 + 1.75%, PayPal €0.49 + 3.50%, and so on through a long table.
• In-store on Professional: Dutch debit cards €0.07 a payment, EU credit cards €0.10 + 1.75%, Bancontact €0.10.

As an illustration, take a Dutch webshop on Professional taking €20,000 a month: 400 iDEAL | Wero payments averaging €30 and 100 EU consumer card payments averaging €80. iDEAL costs 400 × €0.19 = €76. Cards cost €120 (1.50% of €8,000) plus €15 in fixed fees, so €135. With the €35 plan fee, the total is €246 a month before VAT, or about 1.2% of sales. On Pioneer the same month would cost €211 at Professional rates, plus €25 (500 × €0.05) and €50 (0.25% of €20,000), so €286. At this volume the paid plan saves about €40 a month, but it comes with the one-year term.

Fees outside the price table

The general terms carry charges that the pricing page does not show. Onboarding is free for low-risk merchants but costs €250 for medium-risk and from €950 for high-risk merchants. A risk investigation case costs from €100. Non-compliance fees run from €50 for a first breach by a low-risk merchant to €5,000 for a repeated breach by a high-risk one. Separate fines apply to specific violations: processing payments for a third party costs €5,000 per finding plus €1,000 a day, processing for illegal products €10,000 per finding plus €2,000 a day, and repeat violations are tripled. Claims from card schemes or payment providers are passed on with a 15% administration surcharge, and a breach of the transaction rules can bring a €2,500 fine per claim. A Fair Use Policy measures your chargeback, fraud, dispute and API-error ratios each month. In the Exceeded band PAY. can add 10% to that month's fees, and in the Excessive band 1% of volume. Currency conversion costs €0.03 + 2.75% per payment. PAY. can also change its fees on 30 days' notice, and in exceptional cases such as suspected fraud it can change the agreement without notice. We found no published chargeback fee or PCI fee.

Contract and cancellation

The paid plans are the main drawback. The agreement starts with a one-year term and then renews for an indefinite period. Either party can end it in writing on three months' notice, but only after the first year. Upgrading your package during that year restarts it, extending the agreement by a year from the date of the change. If you process no or fewer transactions for two months or more before leaving, PAY. may bill a minimum of 75% of your average fees over the previous six months. Pioneer is genuinely flexible: you can leave immediately. The terms also tell merchants to keep their negotiated rates confidential. If you share a special price with a third party, PAY. may charge its standard rates for up to 12 months back. PAY.'s liability is capped at six months of fees, at most €25,000 per incident and €75,000 a year.

Payouts, reserves and holds

Payments go to Stichting Derdengelden Pay.nl, a third-party funds foundation supervised by DNB, and are paid from there to your bank account daily, weekly (on Mondays) or monthly, as you choose. The default is weekly, and PAY. says payouts are always free. You can take payments straight after registering, but PAY. holds payouts until it has approved your ID, bank statement, Chamber of Commerce extract and signed agreement, which it says takes about one working day. The terms let PAY. set or raise a deposit from your balance if your risk profile changes, hold it for up to six months after you leave, and suspend payouts or reverse transactions if it suspects fraud or a serious breach. If a dispute goes unanswered for more than seven days, PAY. can refund the buyer itself.

Features and integrations

The product range is broad for a mid-size provider. PAY. supports more than 50 payment methods, including most of the local schemes that matter in the Benelux, Austria, Poland, the Nordics, Switzerland, Iberia and Italy, along with around 50 gift cards and eight BNPL and invoice providers. It lists more than 90 integrations and plugins for over 20 webshop systems. It also offers in-store terminals to buy, lease or rent, unattended terminals for kiosks and vending, SoftPOS on Android and Tap to Pay on iPhone, recurring payments, pay by link, and a dashboard that shows online and in-store sales together. Its certifications page lists PCI DSS, ISAE 3402, ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 and PCI 3DS. As of October 2026 it is moving iDEAL traffic to the Wero route, in line with the scheme's own migration, and has phased out SOFORT, Giropay and Payconiq.

Support

PAY.'s contact page lists merchant support by phone and email from 09:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday, with separate lines for fraud reports and its Verify fraud team. Its FAQ gives phone and live-chat hours of 09:00 to 17:30 on working days, and 08:30 to 18:00 for technical questions, while its About page says the team is available 24/7. We go by the hours on the contact page. Business adds a personal account manager and a service-level agreement, and Premium adds priority support. The general terms promise 99.9% platform availability and give a one-off discount of 25% to 100% on the monthly package fee when availability falls below that.

Reputation and complaints

On 13 October 2026 PAY.'s Trustpilot page showed a TrustScore of 3.3 from 339 reviews. The star breakdown is more positive than the score: 68% five-star and 22% one-star. Trustpilot weights recent reviews, and recent reviews are mostly negative: eight of the ten newest, from October 2025 to September 2026, are one-star. PAY. claimed the profile in 2016, and Trustpilot shows it replying to every negative review. Many of the one-star reviews come from consumers who paid a merchant through PAY. and want a refund. PAY. answers these by saying it is a payment service provider and not responsible for the merchant's goods. Other complaints mention slow refunds on international payments, unexpected deductions, and the three-month notice period and a hard-to-find cancellation option. Positive reviews mostly praise the support and fast payment handling. We found no lawsuit or regulatory enforcement action naming TinTel B.V. or PAY. DNB publishes some of its enforcement decisions against payment institutions without naming them, and court rulings on DNB fines are anonymised, so we cannot rule one out.

Who PAY. suits

PAY. suits a Dutch or Belgian business, or an EU business selling heavily into those markets, that wants iDEAL | Wero, Bancontact, cards, BNPL and in-store payments under one regulated contract with a published price list. It is a particularly natural fit for venues with many card terminals or self-service kiosks, such as cinemas, museums, pools and parking, which are among the sectors it targets. Start on Pioneer to test the integration, and move to Professional only once your volume makes the €35 fee cheaper than Pioneer's surcharge and you are comfortable with a one-year commitment and three months' notice. Merchants outside its accepted countries, or selling mainly to non-EU or business cardholders, should compare costs carefully first.