Educational US-style blended rates—not quotes from any provider. Adjust volume, ticket size, Shopify plan, and filters; results sort by lowest estimated monthly cost. Free tools hub · Stripe fee calculator.
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About this tool
Choosing a payment gateway is one of the highest-leverage decisions a merchant makes: the same gross revenue can produce meaningfully different net cash depending on percentage rates, fixed per-transaction fees, monthly platform charges, and how often customers pay with high-cost instruments such as cross-border cards or buy-now-pay-later plans. Marketing pages rarely line up side-by-side at your actual ticket size and monthly volume, and spreadsheet models go stale the moment a processor updates a published schedule or you add a new sales channel.
SynthQuery’s Payment Gateway Comparison is a free, client-side estimator built for operators who need a structured starting point before talking to sales teams or reading dense pricing PDFs. You enter monthly processing volume and average transaction amount, describe your business type for context, select the payment methods you care about—cards, digital wallets, BNPL—and choose how much of your volume behaves like online card-not-present versus in-person acceptance. The tool applies illustrative U.S.-style blended rates for major brands including PayPal, Stripe, Square, Shopify Payments (with a selectable Shopify plan so subscription costs are not ignored), Braintree, Authorize.net, Adyen using a teaching-oriented interchange-plus-style band, Amazon Pay, and—when relevant—Apple Pay and Google Pay modeled as processor-pass-through card pricing plus a separate BNPL line for Klarna/Afterpay-style programs.
Results appear in a sortable comparison table ordered from the lowest estimated total monthly cost upward. Each row breaks out variable percentage fees, aggregated per-transaction fixed fees, monthly platform fees such as Shopify’s plan or Authorize.net’s gateway fee, and setup fees amortized monthly so you can compare apples-to-apples with subscription economics. Heuristic “best for” badges highlight the cheapest overall stack at your inputs, strong subscription-friendly options among major processors, in-person-friendly rows when POS matters, BNPL when enabled, and when Adyen’s interchange-plus teaching estimate beats common flat-rate stacks at higher volumes. A companion chart visualizes estimated annual costs across several volume steps so you can see sensitivity without rebuilding a model. Nothing is uploaded for the math: your browser performs the calculations, which makes the page useful for exploratory scenarios, board prep, and classroom demonstrations. Always reconcile any output with live quotes, contracts, and monthly statements; this page is educational, not a binding fee disclosure from any provider.
What this tool does
The comparison engine combines percentage-of-volume fees, per-transaction fixed fees, explicit monthly platform charges, and one-time setup fees spread across twelve months for planning purposes. Effective rate is total estimated monthly cost divided by modeled volume, expressed as a percentage, which helps compare processors when fixed dimes and quarters dominate low-ticket commerce. Sorting is automatic: the lowest total monthly estimate appears first, which reduces cognitive load when you are scanning eight or more rows at once.
Gateway coverage is intentionally broad yet labeled honestly. PayPal uses a common published-style online blended illustration; Stripe and Square split online versus in-person teaching rates depending on your channel selection; Shopify Payments pulls plan-specific online and in-person percentages from the same plan table used in SynthQuery’s dedicated Shopify fee calculator and adds the plan’s monthly dollar cost to the platform fee column; Braintree uses a published-style percentage plus fixed illustration; Authorize.net layers a monthly gateway fee plus illustrative processing and a setup fee you can treat as amortized; Adyen uses a simplified interchange-plus-style aggregate rather than a full interchange table, because true interchange-plus statements are category-specific; Amazon Pay follows a familiar card-not-present illustration; the wallet row repeats processor-style pricing as a reminder that wallets are not a separate magical rail for most merchants; BNPL uses a high merchant discount rate band suitable for education about pay-in-installment economics.
Badges are heuristics, not awards. “Lowest total cost” always tracks the first row after sorting. “Strong for subscriptions” flags the cheapest option among a curated set of processors that commonly power recurring commerce in the United States. “In-person friendly” compares rows that declare POS support at your current channel assumptions. “BNPL option” appears on the BNPL row when shown. “Interchange++ value” may light up for Adyen when its teaching estimate undercuts a flat-rate Stripe row at sufficient volume—an illustrative pattern enterprises often investigate, not a guarantee for your MCC or geography.
Accessibility is handled with labeled inputs, grouped checkboxes, live status text for screen readers after updates, keyboard-reachable controls, and semantic sections around the table and chart. Performance stays modest by keeping math in a small pure module and lazy-loading the volume chart chunk so the initial route ships less JavaScript until you scroll to visualization.
Technical details
Most small and mid-sized merchants encounter blended pricing: a single discount rate plus a fixed authorization or transaction fee that smooths variability across many underlying interchange categories. It is simple to budget with and easy to display in a comparison table. Interchange-plus (sometimes shown as interchange++) separates network interchange, card-brand assessments, and processor margin. It can be cheaper at scale when your mix skews toward lower-interchange cards, but statements are longer and finance must reconcile more line items. Adyen’s row in this tool uses a compressed teaching estimate meant to convey why interchange-plus can beat flat rates at higher volume without pretending to quote your exact statement.
Monthly fees belong in the same mental model as processing: a $25 gateway fee is a real cost even if your effective percentage looks attractive. Setup fees amortized over twelve months are a planning convention—your accounting may expense them immediately, but spreading them helps compare against processors with no setup line. Digital wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay typically ride existing card agreements; customers authenticate with Face ID or a device token, but the economics usually remain card-not-present unless you are on a special Apple Tap to Pay on iPhone program with different commercial terms.
BNPL merchant fees are not interchangeable with standard card fees. Lenders or BNPL networks fund the customer’s installment plan and charge the merchant a discount that reflects credit risk, marketing value, and guaranteed settlement. That is why the BNPL row uses a higher illustrative percentage than card rows. Treat it as a separate checkout method with its own conversion and margin trade-offs rather than a drop-in replacement for Visa or Mastercard acceptance.
Use cases
Founders launching an online store often narrow finalists to two flat-rate processors and one interchange-plus option. This tool lets them paste the same monthly volume and average order value across all three classes, then see whether headline percentages tell the whole story once fixed fees and Shopify plan costs are included. When the cheapest row is only pennies apart from the second choice, teams can weight non-fee factors: chargeback workflows, payout speed, developer experience, and tax or fraud add-ons.
Merchants switching gateways use the comparison to document before-and-after assumptions for finance. Exporting the Copy summary into an internal memo creates a dated snapshot of which published-style numbers were assumed, which matters when leadership asks why net margin moved after a migration. If you are moving from a gateway-plus-merchant-account stack to an all-in-one platform, compare Authorize.net’s monthly gateway line plus processing against bundled competitors so you do not ignore recurring software that used to live in another GL code.
Businesses expanding internationally can toggle the illustrative cross-border surcharge to stress-test how sensitive net revenue is to foreign cards. The tool does not replace country-specific pricing tables, but it gives a directional nudge that prompts finance to pull real invoices for non-domestic interchange categories. Operators evaluating BNPL can turn on the BNPL row to see how merchant discount rates might compress margin on promoted checkout buttons, then decide whether conversion lift in A/B tests justifies the fee stack.
Content and compliance teams can pair this calculator with SynthQuery’s AI Detector and Humanizer when rewriting checkout disclosures, surcharge notices, or refund policies—payment copy must be accurate, but it should also read clearly to humans and search engines. For marketplace founders, remember that platform take rates sit on top of processing; this page models processor-side costs only, so add your application fee manually when computing seller payouts.
How SynthQuery compares
Manual research across processor websites is slow, inconsistent, and easy to bias: one vendor quotes online rates while another emphasizes in-person, and blog roundups rarely cite effective rates at your ticket size. A structured comparison tool forces the same volume, ticket count, and channel assumptions across rows so differences reflect pricing shape rather than narrative. It also surfaces fixed-fee drag that percentage-only headlines hide, which is essential for coffee-ticket merchants and donation microtransactions.
SynthQuery’s implementation is transparent about uncertainty. Rows include short rate summaries that name the teaching percentages and fixed fees in play, and badges call out heuristics instead of pretending to certify a “winner” for every business on earth. You can copy results into your own models, then swap in contract numbers when you have them. That workflow beats screenshotting marketing pages that may change without notice. When you need processor-specific depth, open the dedicated Stripe, Shopify, PayPal, Square, surcharge, or Wise calculators linked from this page and from the Free tools hub—each drills into line items this comparison intentionally compresses for breadth.
Aspect
SynthQuery
Typical alternatives
Scenario consistency
One volume and average ticket drives every gateway row simultaneously, with optional cross-border and BNPL overlays you control.
Blog tables mix countries, years, and product bundles without normalizing ticket size.
Platform economics
Shopify Payments includes selectable plan subscription fees so ecommerce totals are not understated.
Gateway-only quotes ignore commerce software that still hits your P&L.
Fixed-fee visibility
Per-transaction fixed columns show when dimes matter more than basis points.
Percentage-only comparisons mis-rank options for low-AOV sellers.
Privacy
Fee arithmetic runs locally in the browser for the interactive table and chart.
Some calculators phone home with inputs for analytics or lead capture.
Depth vs breadth
Broad gateway coverage with links to deep single-processor calculators when you need detail.
Either too shallow (one headline rate) or too narrow (single brand only).
How to use this tool effectively
Start by entering your monthly dollar volume for the payment types you are modeling—typically card and wallet capture for e-commerce or omnichannel retail. Next, add your average transaction amount. The tool divides volume by that average to estimate how many discrete charges occur each month, which matters because fixed cents-per-transaction components hit small tickets harder than large ones. If your business is highly seasonal, run separate scenarios for peak and slow months; copying the text summary after each pass helps you archive assumptions.
Choose a business type from the list. This label does not change the mathematics in the current version, but it frames how you should read the results: SaaS teams may emphasize recurring billing and lower dispute rates, retailers may care about in-person versus online mix, marketplaces may still need Connect-style splits that are outside this calculator, and nonprofits may negotiate different effective rates with processors even when published schedules look identical to for-profit merchants.
Select your sales channel mix. “Mostly online” applies card-not-present style percentages and fixed fees for providers that publish different numbers for in-person taps or dips. “Mostly in-person” biases toward POS-friendly schedules such as Square’s common in-person illustration versus its online card rate. “Mixed” blends the two with a simple fifty-fifty weighting so you can approximate omnichannel businesses without building a full allocation model—if you know your true split, approximate it by running online-only and in-person-only scenarios separately and combining results manually.
Under payment methods, toggle cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay, and BNPL as needed. Cards and wallets flow through the major processor rows; BNPL adds a separate high-discount-rate line because merchant service charges for pay-in-four style products are typically well above standard card blended pricing. Digital wallets in most stacks are still card rails underneath, so the tool shows a dedicated “Apple Pay / Google Pay” row using Stripe-style card-not-present teaching numbers to remind teams that wallet buttons rarely erase interchange economics entirely.
Pick the Shopify plan that matches your storefront when you want Shopify Payments in the comparison. The calculator adds that plan’s monthly subscription to the Shopify row so you are not comparing gateway fees alone against processors that do not bundle a commerce platform fee in the same line item. Use the filter checkboxes to narrow the table: require in-person capability, force online-only pricing, insist on recurring-friendly processors, layer an illustrative cross-border surcharge, or include BNPL even when you did not check BNPL under methods. Click Recalculate after large changes; the initial page load already runs once with defaults. Use Copy summary to paste ranked estimates into Notion, email, or a spreadsheet, then visit the Free tools hub and the full tools directory for adjacent fee calculators and AI writing utilities.
Limitations and best practices
These numbers are estimates for education and planning, not tax, legal, or investment advice. Real invoices include interchange variability, chargebacks, reserves, FX spreads, failed payment retries, and product-specific lines such as fraud scoring or tax automation. Processor pricing changes by country, industry, card type, and negotiated enterprise agreements. Re-run scenarios when you change channels, launch subscriptions, or enter new regions. If you pass fees to cardholders, follow applicable laws and card-network rules; SynthQuery’s credit card surcharge calculator can help model pass-through separately. Bookmark https://synthquery.com/tools for the full catalog alongside AI detection and humanization products.
Polish customer-facing refund and dunning copy while keeping a human tone.
Frequently asked questions
There is no universal winner. The lowest fee gateway at your business is the one whose combination of percentage rate, fixed per-transaction fee, monthly platform charges, and charge mix produces the smallest total monthly cost after you add any cross-border or BNPL surcharges you actually experience. Small tickets make fixed cents matter more than basis points; large tickets flip that relationship. This calculator ranks illustrative rows for the scenario you type, but your live ranking can change when interchange categories, disputes, or custom pricing enter the picture. Use the sorted table as a hypothesis generator, then validate with quotes and statements.
“Better” depends on product needs, not fees alone. Stripe is often chosen for developer-centric APIs, Billing, Connect marketplaces, and broad global coverage. PayPal emphasizes wallet share and consumer recognition, which can lift conversion for certain demographics. Fee-wise, published-style U.S. online blended illustrations frequently differ between the two, and effective costs move with international cards, micropayments, and optional products. Model both with identical volume and ticket assumptions in this comparison, then weigh payout timing, dispute tooling, in-person hardware, and accounting integrations. For Stripe-only depth, open SynthQuery’s Stripe fee calculator; for PayPal-specific line items, use the PayPal fee calculator linked from this page.
Interchange-plus pricing separates the interchange component set by card networks and issuers from the processor’s markup and from assessments such as scheme fees. It can be more transparent than blended pricing and sometimes cheaper when your card mix is favorable, but statements are longer and finance teams must reconcile more detail. Interchange++ adds another explicit layer for scheme fees in some regions. This tool’s Adyen row uses a compressed teaching estimate to illustrate why interchange-plus-style stacks can undercut flat-rate competitors at higher volume; it does not reproduce full interchange tables, which vary by MCC, card product, and country.
Many modern payment service providers combine gateway and processing so you can board without a separate traditional merchant account relationship, especially when you are starting out. High-volume merchants, certain regulated categories, or businesses that want direct deposit relationships with acquiring banks may still use ISOs or bank-sponsored merchant accounts, sometimes paired with gateways like Authorize.net. Whether you “need” one depends on risk review, payout structure, and feature requirements. This comparison includes an Authorize.net-style row with a monthly gateway fee to remind you that split stacks exist; compare total landed cost, not labels.
Accuracy is limited by simplification. Real life includes tiered interchange, rewards cards, business cards, level II/III data, chargeback fees, reserves, instant payout options, and negotiated enterprise rates. Published marketing numbers change and differ by geography. The tool uses U.S.-oriented teaching blends and flags illustrative items such as cross-border and BNPL. Treat outputs as directional planning aids. For contractual decisions, use processor quotes, sandbox reporting, and month-end statements rather than any third-party calculator.
Shopify bundles commerce software subscriptions with access to Shopify Payments in supported regions. Lower plan tiers may carry higher blended processing percentages than higher tiers, while higher tiers raise monthly software fees that can still be net-positive if volume is large enough. This calculator ties Shopify Payments percentages to the plan you select and adds the plan’s monthly fee into the platform column so you do not compare gateway math alone against processors that do not bundle a storefront subscription. For deeper Shopify-specific scenarios, use the dedicated Shopify fee calculator.
For most merchants, Apple Pay and Google Pay are authentication and tokenization layers on top of existing card agreements, not separate low-cost rails. The wallet row therefore mirrors common card-not-present teaching rates rather than inventing a discount. In-person Tap to Pay on iPhone programs or special promotions can create exceptions; read your agreement. Checking the wallet checkbox helps finance teams explain why enabling Apple Pay is primarily a UX and fraud-reduction decision, not a magic fee elimination.
Buy-now-pay-later providers typically charge merchants a merchant discount rate that is higher than standard card blended pricing because they fund installments, assume credit risk, and market to shoppers at checkout. Conversion lifts sometimes justify the cost, but you should model BNPL as its own line item, which this tool does when you enable BNPL or force the BNPL filter on. Rates vary by product, region, and negotiation—treat the BNPL row as educational, not a quote.
The interactive comparison runs locally in your browser to produce the table and chart. Your volume and ticket assumptions are not transmitted to SynthQuery solely to perform these calculations. General website analytics and hosting logs may still apply as described in the site’s privacy policy, but unlike server-side calculators, the fee math here does not require sending your inputs to our application servers for arithmetic. Follow your company’s policies when copying summaries into email or tickets.