How we review payment providers

The Parity Score

The Parity Score is a 0–100 composite of five categories, each scored independently and combined with fixed weights:

• 35%Pricing
• 25%Features
• 20%Ease of use
• 10%Customer support
• 10%User reviews

The weights are fixed across all providers and never adjusted per review. Pricing carries the most weight because it is the reason merchants come to us — and it is the category where advertising and reality diverge the most.

Evidence tiers

Not all evidence is equal. Every input to a review carries a trust tier, and higher tiers always override lower ones when they conflict:

• Merchant statementsHighest weight

  Real processing statements uploaded by merchants. These carry the most weight everywhere they appear — they are the only source that shows what a provider actually charges after card mix, downgrades, and add-on fees.

• Published rate cards and contractsHigh weight

  The provider's own published pricing, captured continuously by our scrapers with full price history. Every fee we publish links to where we found it.

• Regulator and platform dataMedium weight

  CFPB complaint records, BBB ratings, and aggregated review-platform scores (Trustpilot, Google, Capterra, G2). Quantified third-party signals, weighted by sample size.

• Independent critic reviewsMedium weight

  Editorial reviews from established industry publications, extracted into structured findings and cross-checked against our own data.

• Community sentimentLowest weight

  Recurring themes from public merchant forums. Never quoted, never decisive — used only to flag patterns (fund holds, support quality) worth verifying against stronger evidence.

The fact-check

Every review benchmarks the provider's advertised headline rate against the blended effective rate we observe in real merchant data, and publishes the verdict — including when the claim holds. The same evidence feeds each provider's transparency score: a deterministic 0–100 measure of how much of its pricing a merchant can verify before signing.

How reviews are produced and checked

Parity reviews are drafted with AI assistance and gated by layered checks before anything publishes. Drafts are composed only from the structured research file for that provider; a separate reviewer pass challenges unsupported claims; a deterministic grounding check verifies that every price, percentage, and statistic in the draft appears in the underlying research; and an originality check rejects text that leans on any source's phrasing. A review that fails any check is held as a draft for a human editor — it cannot auto-publish.

Reviews regenerate when the underlying data changes, and every page shows its last-reviewed date. If you spot an error, we correct it and regenerate the review rather than patching around it.

Independence

No provider can pay for a rating, sponsor a review, or see one before publication. How referral relationships work — and what they can never influence — is documented in how we make money and our editorial policy.