About Merchant Verdict
Credit card processing is a $100+ billion industry with a dirty secret: most of its profit comes from fees its customers don’t understand.
Tiered pricing. PCI non-compliance penalties. Leased terminals. “Qualified” rate buckets designed so the advertised number is never the number you pay. An entire salesforce of ISO reps paid to keep it confusing — because confusion is the business model.
Merchant Verdict exists to end that.
We’re an independent review site. We don’t sell processing, we don’t take money from processors for rankings, and we publish the actual math — real rate cards, real break-even calculations, real fee comparisons — so a busy owner can make a decision in 15 minutes that saves them thousands a year.
How we make money: Reader-supported affiliate commissions. If you sign up for a processor through our links, we may earn a commission — typically $100–$500 per signup. It never costs you extra, and it never influences our verdicts. We’d rather lose a commission than recommend a bad processor, because our entire business depends on you trusting us more than the sales rep who cold-called you last Tuesday.
How we research: We pull published rate cards, cross-check them against current third-party reviews and user reports, and run the numbers ourselves — break-even volumes, per-invoice cost comparisons, fee-schedule audits. We don’t claim hands-on testing we haven’t done. When a processor won’t publish a fee, we say so, loudly. That’s usually the most important thing in the review.
Our bias, stated upfront: We’re on the small business’s side. Always. The industry has enough advocates for itself.