Tilled Review

A Boulder, Colorado company that sells payments infrastructure to software companies rather than merchant accounts to businesses. Tilled claims to have coined the term PayFac-as-a-Service: a software vendor gets the economics of being a payment facilitator — a share of the processing revenue on every transaction its customers make — without taking on the registration, underwriting and compliance burden of actually becoming one. It is one of the very few companies in this catalogue that publishes its own prices in public, which is the main reason it grades where it does.

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

A payments company whose customers are software companies

Tilled was founded in Boulder, Colorado in 2019 by Caleb Avery, and it is worth being clear from the start about who it is for. If you run a shop, a restaurant, a clinic or an online store, Tilled does not sell to you. It sells to the company that makes the software you run your business in — and its pitch to that company is that payments can be a revenue line rather than a cost line.

The mechanism is the payment facilitator model. A payfac holds one master merchant account and onboards other businesses underneath it as sub-merchants; that is how Square and Stripe work. The economics are excellent and the barriers are brutal — card network registration, underwriting every sub-merchant, ongoing compliance, and liability when a sub-merchant's chargebacks exceed what you can claw back. Tilled's answer, and the phrase it says it coined, is PayFac-as-a-Service: it carries the registration, the underwriting infrastructure and the compliance, and your platform gets the branded onboarding experience and a share of the processing revenue.

The unusual part: it tells you what it charges

Almost every company reviewed on this site treats its price as a negotiating position. Tilled publishes two plans on a public page:

• Start-Up — $500 per month, 70% revenue share, positioned for platforms processing under $5 million a month.
• Scaling — $2,500 per month, 80% revenue share, for platforms above $5 million a month.
• Both plans include the same capabilities: merchant management, card-present payments, subscriptions, hosted checkout, white-label customisation, fraud and risk management, PCI compliance, API integration and support.

There is no capability gating between tiers, which is a quietly respectable choice — the more expensive plan buys you a better revenue split, not features withheld from smaller customers. Tilled's own revenue calculator assumes a merchant price of 2.9% + $0.30 with no monthly account fee against a partner cost of 2.27% + $0.15. Those are marketing assumptions rather than a quoted buy rate, and you should not build a board deck on them, but they at least show you the shape of the margin the model is designed around.

What Tilled does not publish is the rest of the agreement: no contract length, no minimum commitment, no notice period, no exit fee. Transparency about the recurring price is genuinely valuable and it is not the same as transparency about the contract.

Card-present is the differentiator most people will miss

A lot of API-first payments platforms are card-not-present only, which quietly disqualifies them from every vertical with a physical counter — restaurants, salons, veterinary practices, field services, retail. Tilled supports card-present across the US and Canada and expanded that through a partnership with Handpoint that brought dozens of terminal options onto the platform. If your software serves businesses that take payments in person, this is likely the deciding technical fact.

The risks of buying infrastructure from a startup

Tilled has announced about $34.5 million of funding: an $11 million Series A in May 2021, an $11 million extension in February 2022 led by G Squared, and $12.5 million in October 2024 led by Canvas Ventures and UPC Capital Ventures. Company directories quote a lifetime total nearer $40 million; we could not reconcile that against the rounds Tilled itself has announced, and have used the smaller, verifiable figure. It has been building distribution — a strategic partnership with North announced in October 2024, another with KORT Payments in July 2025 — and it names its sponsor banks openly: registered ISO/MSP of Pinnacle Bank, a Tennessee bank doing business as Synovus Bank, and registered ISO of Citizens Bank.

All of that is reassuring as far as it goes, and it does not go as far as a balance sheet. Thirty-odd million dollars is a modest amount of capital for payments infrastructure, and a software platform that builds a payments revenue line on Tilled has taken on Tilled's survival as a business dependency. The exposure is not really the monthly fee — it is that once your customers' sub-merchant accounts, tokenised card data and payout arrangements live on this platform, moving them is a migration project affecting every one of your customers, not a cancellation. Ask about token portability and what happens to sub-merchant accounts if the relationship ends, and ask before you integrate.

The second gap is verification. There is no substantive Trustpilot or BBB record for Tilled and the software directories carry too few reviews to summarise. That is entirely normal for a B2B infrastructure vendor with a few hundred customers, and it is not a criticism — but it removes the independent check you would normally run. Get references from platforms at your stage, in your vertical, and ask them specifically about support responsiveness and underwriting turnaround for their sub-merchants.

The grade

B. The product solves a real problem, the card-present support is a genuine differentiator, and publishing the actual commercial terms in public is the kind of behaviour this site exists to reward. What holds it below the top of the range is size and verifiability: a modest capital base, no independent review record, an unpublished contract, and a $500 monthly floor that starts running before a platform has processed a single transaction. Compelling for a software company with volume and developers. Not a merchant account, and not a place to experiment.