The part of a card payment that moves data
What does a business pay for when it buys a gateway and nothing else? Authorize.net, which card network Visa’s fiscal 2026 annual report lists among its own acceptance products, answers the question on its pricing page. Its FAQ calls a gateway the technology that transmits payment data between the customer, the website or terminal, and the payment networks.
The money goes elsewhere. The same FAQ calls a merchant account the account that holds the funds after a transaction is approved, until they move on to the business’s own bank account. A business that already has one can buy the gateway alone.
What the gateway costs on its own
The page, read on November 12, 2026, prices the two options very differently. The table works them through for a shop that makes 1,000 card sales of $50 in a 30-day month and closes one batch of transactions every day, so it pays the batch fee 30 times.
| Authorize.net plan | Monthly fee | Per transaction | Our total for 1,000 sales of $50 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gateway only | $25 | 10 cents, plus a 10-cent daily batch fee | $128, before the acquirer’s own charges |
| All-in-one, merchant account included | $25 | 2.9% + 30 cents | $1,775 |
The totals are our arithmetic from the page’s rates. The gap is the processing. The all-in-one price includes Authorize.net’s own merchant account, while a gateway-only business still pays its acquiring bank for processing on top of the $128.
At the far end of the scale, a payment firm can license a gateway’s entire codebase and run it itself, though none of the four vendors we checked in November 2026 publishes the price of such a source code license.
What the law calls a gateway
None of the eight payment services in the EU’s 2015 directive is a gateway. Article 3(j) of PSD2 leaves out technical service providers that support payment services “without them entering at any time into possession of the funds”, including those that process and store data. A gateway that only routes messages fits that description.
That may change. The Payment Services Regulation agreed by Parliament and Council negotiators in November 2025 would apply, according to the Parliament’s press release, to technical service providers supporting payment services as well as to banks and payment institutions.
India draws the same line in its 2020 guidelines. The Reserve Bank of India defines payment gateways as entities providing the technology to route and process an online payment “without any involvement in handling of funds”, while payment aggregators, which receive and pool customers’ money before passing it to merchants, fall under separate rules in the same guidelines.
Gateway, processor and merchant account
The labels blur, even in official glossaries. The PCI Security Standards Council’s glossary lists “payment gateway” as another name for a payment processor and counts gateways among the service providers its card data standard covers. Authorize.net’s FAQ keeps the gateway apart from the merchant account and adds that a PayPal account is not a merchant account and cannot be connected to its gateway.
A crypto gateway works another way
A crypto payment gateway shares the name but not the chain behind it. No card network or acquirer sits in the middle, and the customer sends coins to an address, or connects a wallet, on a screen the provider shows. When you compare quotes, ask whether a price covers the gateway alone or the processing as well.