Rainforest Review

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.

Infrastructure for platforms, not a merchant account

Rainforest is not a merchant account provider and does not pretend to be. It sells payfac-as-a-service: a vertical software platform — field service software, a healthcare billing product, a trucking platform — embeds payments into its own product, and Rainforest carries the underwriting, onboarding, risk and compliance work that would otherwise require the platform to register as a payment facilitator in its own right. Named customers on its site include Keap, RoadSync, Rose Rocket, Payground, Curae, Materio and Quote Machine. If you are a business looking for card acceptance, you will meet Rainforest inside software you already pay for, not by signing with it.

The company was founded in 2022 in Atlanta by Joshua Silver, who had previously co-founded Patientco, a healthcare payments business. That is a short history for a company sitting in the middle of other people's money movement, and it is the single largest reason to be careful here.

The rate card, published in full

What sets Rainforest apart in its category is that you can read its prices without talking to anyone. Interchange and dues pass through at cost. Cards cost 0.30% and $0.30 per transaction at the entry tier, 0.25% and $0.25 above $5m in monthly dollar volume or 50,000 monthly transactions, and 0.20% and $0.20 above $15m or 150,000. ACH is $0.20 an item with no volume-based fee, standard payouts $0.20, the account updater $0.23, 3DS $0.31 an attempt, ACH account validation $1.49, disputes and returns $15 each, and an EMV terminal $11.25 a month. Rainforest states it charges no PCI DSS programme or non-compliance fees.

Two details deserve attention. The tiers are pick-a-tier rather than fill-a-tier — reach a tier and the whole month bills at it, which is generous on the way up and unhelpful for a platform whose volume swings seasonally, because a quiet month drops you back a tier entirely. And the risk management fee, the one line with no number, is set during onboarding according to the risk Rainforest assesses in your vertical. On a platform serving a jumpy category, that fee is where the real negotiation happens.

No revenue share, and why that is the pitch

Most payfac-as-a-service providers take a share of the payments revenue a platform earns. Rainforest bills a buy rate instead and lets the platform set merchant pricing on top. The practical consequence is about who benefits from optimisation: if you do the work to route transactions into cheaper interchange categories, or you reprice your merchant base, the gain lands entirely in your accounts rather than being split. Rainforest's own revenue calculator models a platform keeping 60% of the payments revenue while Rainforest keeps 40% — an illustration, and one that excludes the risk management fee by its own footnote, so treat it as a shape rather than a forecast.

The counter-argument is real. A revenue-share provider has a direct financial stake in your payments programme succeeding, and often puts more support and onboarding effort behind it. A buy-rate provider is closer to a utility. Small platforms that need help getting merchants onto payments in the first place sometimes do better with a partner whose incentives are tied to attach rate.

Funding, growth and how much of it is checkable

Rainforest raised a $20m Series A in 2024 and announced a $29m Series B on 8 September 2025, led by Matrix Partners and Infinity Ventures with Accel and Tech Square Ventures participating. Cumulative funding is reported inconsistently: about $57.5m in the Series B announcement, $49m in trade coverage counting only the two priced rounds, and $60.75m if you add the $29m to the $31.75m total reported after the Series A. The two round sizes are solid; the cumulative figure is not, and we would not quote one to two decimal places. The company said the round would fund expansion into Canada, tap-to-phone acceptance, additional payment methods and fintech orchestration, and in February 2026 it launched an embedded PayPal integration.

The growth numbers attached to that round — more than tenfold revenue growth since the Series A, billions of dollars in live processing volume — come from Rainforest's own announcement. Investors putting $29m in presumably saw the underlying figures, which is some evidence, but it is not the same as independent verification and should not be read as such.

What we could not find

There is very little public merchant or platform feedback on Rainforest — no substantial BBB or Trustpilot record of the kind that exists for consumer-facing processors. That is normal for a business whose customers are a few hundred software companies rather than a hundred thousand merchants, but it does mean the usual complaint-pattern check is unavailable. Nothing published tells you the contract term, notice period or termination fee either. Ask for all of it, along with the loss allocation when a merchant fails, before you route a customer's money through anyone this young.

The verdict

For a vertical SaaS platform, Rainforest is a credible option and an unusually honest one about price. The published buy rate with no revenue split is a genuinely different offer, and the fee schedule around it is complete enough to model against. It earns a B rather than better because the company is four years old, because the risk management fee is a blank the rate card cannot fill, and because there is not yet enough public track record to know how it behaves when a platform's merchant portfolio goes wrong — which is the only question that really matters in embedded payments.