GoCardlessB72
Bank & A2A Payments · Subscription, membership and instalment businesses billing established customers on a schedule, especially …
Overview
GoCardless is the strongest published option in the US for collecting recurring payments straight from a bank account, and its capped pricing makes it dramatically cheaper than card rails on large invoices. It is not a merchant account and cannot take a card, so for most businesses it sits alongside a card processor rather than replacing one. Two things temper the recommendation: a poor public review record driven by account restrictions, and an agreed acquisition by Mollie that had not been publicly confirmed as closed when we checked.
Best for: Subscription, membership and instalment businesses billing established customers on a schedule, especially where individual invoices are large enough for the per-transaction cap to bite.
Strengths
- + Pricing is published in full — rates, caps, add-on fees and failure fees are all on the public pricing page rather than behind a quote form.
- + The per-transaction cap makes high-value invoices far cheaper to collect than on card rails.
- + One integration reaches ACH in the US and the equivalent bank debit schemes in more than 30 countries.
- + No set-up fee and no published early termination fee; you pay for transactions collected plus any optional add-ons.
- + Built specifically for recurring billing, with mandate handling and retry logic rather than card-style one-off charges bolted onto a subscription.
Trade-offs
- – No card acceptance of any kind — this is bank debit only, so most businesses will still need a separate card processor.
- – A 2.3 out of 5 Trustpilot score across 2,475 reviews, with complaints concentrated on accounts being restricted during compliance review and on slow, email-only support.
- – Bank debit is inherently slow to clear and to reverse compared with cards, which makes it a poor fit for anything sold to a first-time or walk-up customer.
- – The higher-featured Advanced and Pro plans cost more per transaction, not less, so adding features raises your unit cost.
- – Ownership is in flux: Mollie agreed to acquire GoCardless in December 2025, and the effect on US pricing and support has not been spelled out.
- – Payout speed is tiered: two-day payouts are marketed as an Advanced-plan feature and GoCardless does not publish the Standard-plan settlement time, so the cheapest plan is also the slowest to pay you.
Fees in detail
- Online rate: 0.5% + $0.05 per domestic transaction on the Standard plan, capped at $5. Advanced is 0.75% + $0.05 capped at $6.25; Pro is 0.9% + $0.05 cap
- International: 1.5% + $0.05 on Standard, 1.75% + $0.05 on Advanced, 1.9% + $0.05 on Pro.
- Disputes: $$5, applied only once an account exceeds 15 chargebacks in a month.
Standard published rate for a domestic online card payment. Confirm current pricing on GoCardless's pricing page.
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