PayKings Review

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

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

How PayKings pricing works

PayKings is one of the very few high-risk specialists that publishes its pricing rather than hiding it behind a sales call. The model is interchange-plus across three tiers: Starter for accounts under $100K a month, Growth from $100K to $300K, and a custom Enterprise tier above that where restricted verticals are quoted during underwriting. You pay the card networks' interchange cost plus a disclosed markup, which makes the bill auditable in a way tiered high-risk pricing never is.

Published rates and fees

• Starter (under $100K/mo): interchange + 1.10% + $0.25, T+2 settlement, email support
• Growth ($100K-$300K/mo): interchange + 0.80% + $0.10, next-day settlement, dedicated rep, monthly fee waived
• Enterprise ($300K+/mo): custom pricing, same-day settlement where available, 24/7 team and a dedicated risk analyst
• Monthly fee: $13, waived on Growth
• PCI compliance: $4.50 per month
• Chargebacks: $25 per incident
• Advertised: no setup fees, no hidden costs, no long-term contracts

The thing the website does not tell you

PayKings is an agent office, not a registered ISO. It sells and services merchant accounts but holds no card-network registration of its own, and submits applications to registered ISOs — North, Maverick, Worldpay and Global Payments among them. Nothing about that model is improper; it is how a large part of this industry works, and PayKings' panel is a genuine asset, because a file declined at one bank can be moved to another rather than dying. But the site does not disclose it, and a merchant reading that rate card would reasonably believe they are buying from the processor.

The consequence is concrete. The published tiers are PayKings' offer. The merchant agreement, the term, any early-termination fee, any rolling reserve and the day your money actually lands are the sponsoring ISO's, and they vary by back end. The single most valuable question to ask before signing is which one your file is going to — and then to get the term, the termination fee, the reserve percentage and its release schedule in writing from the company named on the paper.

Card-present costs the same as online

The published markups apply across online, keyed and in-person transactions alike, with no card-present discount on the Starter tier. For a retailer whose volume is mostly swiped or tapped, that flat 1.10% is expensive: low-risk card-present specialists price their in-person markup at a fraction of it. PayKings' pricing makes the most sense for card-not-present merchants comparing it against a flat-rate payfac rather than against a retail interchange-plus quote.

What the reputation signals do and do not say

Trustpilot rates PayKings around 4.7 across roughly 225 reviews, and Google 4.7 across 94; Merchant Maverick scored it 4.4 out of 5 in July 2026. Those are good numbers. The Better Business Bureau is the gap: PayKings is not accredited and carries no rating at all, because the bureau says it lacks sufficient information to issue one. That is neutral rather than damaging, but in an industry where BBB is the first thing a cautious merchant checks, an absent record is worth knowing about rather than glossing over.

What to pin down before you sign

Four things, and all four come from the back end rather than from PayKings: the contract term and whether it auto-renews, the exact early-termination fee if any, the reserve percentage and its release schedule, and your funding timetable. Ask which ISO the file is being placed with, and confirm all four with that company. The published rate card gives you a strong anchor going into that conversation, which is more than any direct competitor offers — but the anchor is not the agreement.