A payment gateway is the part of your stack nobody sees: it carries the transaction from your website, invoice or virtual terminal to the processor, and brings the approval back. Pick well and you never think about it again. Pick badly and you're re-entering card numbers and reconciling by hand.
What a modern gateway should include
- Invoicing & pay links — send a link, get paid, no checkout build required
- Recurring billing — subscriptions and payment plans on autopilot
- A card vault — tokenized cards on file for repeat billing
- A virtual terminal — key in phone orders from any browser
- Integrations — QuickBooks sync at minimum
Every gateway we carry does all five. The differences are in the details:
The short version of each
- Next2Pay — our flagship. Invoicing, text-to-pay, recurring billing and dual pricing in one app, settling to your NextPay account. If you're starting fresh, start here.
- FluidPay — the strongest all-rounder among the majors: hosted pay pages, mobile virtual terminal, clean recurring tools.
- NMI — modular and developer-friendly, with a Customer Vault and automatic card updater that keeps subscriptions alive when cards reissue.
- Authorize.net — the most universally supported name; if a shopping cart or software exists, it integrates. Automated Recurring Billing plus QuickBooks sync.
- Valor — best when you also run Valor terminals in-store; PayNow links and The Vault tie online and counter together.
- iPOSPays — dual pricing online, tied tightly to Dejavoo terminal ecosystems.
- Luqra — fast-funding checkout built for e-commerce and subscription sellers.
How to not overpay
Gateways through NextPay run a flat $25/month with a small per-transaction fee — and because the gateway and processing live on one account, you're not stacking a gateway bill on top of a processor bill from someone else. If you're paying more than that for gateway access alone, that's worth a five-minute conversation.
See the full lineup on Gateways & Integrations, with detailed pricing on Online Gateways.