Payment Gateway Cost 2026: Verified Rates Across 30 Vendors

Items to ask about explicitly

PCI non-compliance fee: applied on quote-only acquirers if you fail to attest annually; amount is set in the merchant agreement and is not published on the open web.
Account Updater fee: per-card-update charge for VAU (Visa Account Updater) and ABU (Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater).
Monthly minimum: a floor applied if processing volume drops below threshold; common on interchange-plus contracts.
Early Termination Fee (ETF): charged on most multi-year acquirer contracts and absent from Stripe / Helcim; the dollar amount is set in the merchant agreement and is not published on the open web.
IC++ packaging: separating interchange, assessments, and acquirer margin into three line items vs IC+ which bundles assessments into the margin.
Batch fee: per-day batch settlement fee. Authorize.net Gateway Only charges $0.10 per transaction plus $0.10 daily batch (authorize.net pricing).
Dispute representment / handling fee: distinct from the chargeback fee itself.
Cross-border + FX: Stripe charges +1.5% cross-border plus +1% currency conversion on top of the base rate (stripe.com/pricing).
3DS over-allowance fee: Stripe Billing prices 3D Secure as a pass-through where the included allowance is exceeded (stripe.com/billing/pricing).