How we research payment processors — without the fake lab coats.
We don’t claim to have secretly shopped 500 merchant accounts. Here’s what we actually do:
- Compare published rate cards. We pull interchange-plus markups, flat rates, monthly fees, PCI fees, and early-termination terms straight from processor pricing pages — then note what changed and when.
- Read the fee schedules. We go through contracts, program guides, and support docs line by line to surface the fees processors bury: batch fees, PCI non-compliance penalties, statement fees, leased-terminal traps.
- Analyze verified user reviews. We read hundreds of reviews on G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius, plus merchant forums and complaint boards, weighting recent, detailed, verified reviews over one-line rants and obvious plants.
- Run the math ourselves. Every processor gets the same treatment: break-even volumes, per-invoice cost comparisons, fee-schedule audits. We show our work in tables, not adjectives.
- Publish a verdict. Every comparison ends with a clear recommendation tied to your situation — who should pick which processor, and which ones to skip. No ties, no “it depends” cop-outs.
What we don’t do: We don’t accept payment for rankings. We don’t trash processors unfairly — when one publishes honest rates, we say so enthusiastically. And we don’t pretend we tested something we didn’t — when a processor won’t publish a fee, we say so, loudly. That’s usually the most important thing in the review.
A note on affiliate links: Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you sign up through one, the processor pays us a commission — typically $100–$500 per signup — at no extra cost to you. Commissions never influence our rankings or verdicts. We’d rather lose a commission than recommend a bad processor.