Payments and billing

Payments and billing services take card payments and run subscriptions for you. They differ most in who is the seller: a payment processor leaves you as the seller, so registering for and filing sales tax and VAT stays with you, while a merchant of record sells on your behalf and files the tax inside a higher fee.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, security, help and documentation pages:

• Pricing clarity: how many fee lines you must add to price a typical business, and whether every fee is on the pricing page.
• Fees on $10,000 a month: total fees at one stated scenario of card subscriptions, with the arithmetic and any assumption shown.
• Tax and compliance you inherit: whether the vendor is merchant of record, handles buyer billing support, and states PCI DSS and a SOC 2 Type II report.
• Payouts and currencies: how often you are paid, what a payout costs, and how many currencies customers can be charged in.
• Team and control: dashboard roles, SAML SSO, two-factor authentication and an audit log.
• Data portability: whether saved cards can move to another processor, and how customer and subscription data can be exported.

Because the models differ, fees are compared at one reference scenario and the arithmetic is shown. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.