Data · Pricing transparency audit
We scored 8 pages on banking as a service pricing . One domain of seven published a number.
No banking as a service provider publishes a rate card. Boldrails read the eight banking pages ranking on Google's first page for banking as a service pricing and for the acronym query on 2 August 2026, and scored each against seven fee lines. One domain of seven published a buy-side figure, and it sells BaaS. Four fee lines were disclosed by nobody.
- 8 pages read
- 7 domains audited
- 1 domain discloses
- Audited 2 Aug 2026
Onboarding in 3 to 14 days, depending on your case
Last updated: 2 August 2026
The census at a glance
1 of 7
Audited domains publishing a buy-side figure
8 pages read, 2026-08-02
0 of 7
Disclosing per-account, per-transaction, reserve or revenue split
Four fee lines, zero numbers
7 of 7
Pricing cells in the top provider comparison carrying no rate
Backbase, retrieved 2026-08-02
5
Pricing questions the top-ranking guide asks and never answers
Unit, retrieved 2026-08-02
3
Mutually inconsistent setup-cost ranges inside the one article that discloses
$50k-$200k, £25k-£100k and £30k-£75k, same page
$50/mo
Paywall on the only practitioner buy-side figures we could find
Sacra, and the practitioner is anonymous
In short
No banking as a service provider publishes a rate card. On 2 August 2026 we read the eight banking pages ranking on Google's first page for banking as a service pricing and for the acronym query, and scored each one against seven fee lines. Eight pages across seven domains. One domain published a buy-side figure, and it belongs to a BaaS vendor quoting what its competitors charge. Per-account fees, per-transaction fees, reserve and revenue split were disclosed by nobody.
By Claude Igrow. Last updated: 2 August 2026.
The finding
What does banking as a service actually cost?
Nobody will tell you. That is not a dodge, it is the measured result. We read the eight banking pages ranking for banking as a service pricing and for the acronym query on 2 August 2026, and scored each against seven standard fee lines. One domain of seven published a buy-side number, and that domain sells BaaS.
The seven lines a BaaS contract is built from are setup, platform or monthly, per-account, per-transaction, reserve, minimum commitment, and revenue split. Every provider we looked at uses some combination of them. None puts a rate next to them in public.
That leaves buyers doing something strange: budgeting for a core piece of infrastructure with no reference price at all. This page is the reference we wanted and could not find.
What this means
If you are building a business case for embedded banking, you cannot benchmark it against public data, because public data does not exist. You can only benchmark it against the same questions asked of three or more providers in parallel. Those questions are in the checklist below.
Quote-gating
Why do BaaS providers not publish their pricing?
BaaS pricing is negotiated per programme and usually sits under an NDA, so it gets resolved in a sales call rather than on a page. The clearest evidence is the highest-ranking provider comparison in our set. It lists a pricing cell for seven platforms, and not one of the seven carries a rate.
Those seven cells, reproduced exactly as published in Backbase's "Banking as a Service Platforms: Top 7 Compared for 2026" (retrieved 2 August 2026):
- 1.Backbase: "Contact Backbase for enterprise pricing."
- 2.Stripe Treasury: "Transaction-based. Contact for volume pricing."
- 3.Treasury Prime: "Revenue share with partner banks."
- 4.Unit: "Per-account and transaction fees."
- 5.Solaris: "Platform fees plus transaction-based pricing."
- 6.ClearBank: "Transaction-based with volume discounts."
- 7.Synctera: "Revenue share with partner banks."
Three of those cells name a pricing model. Four are an instruction to get in touch. Seven of seven give you nothing to put in a spreadsheet.
The page ranking first for the query does something subtler. Unit's "The ultimate guide to Banking as a service" has a section headed Economics, and it asks the reader five questions:
- "Is there a platform fee?"
- "Will you be charged on a per-account basis?"
- "What does it cost to process different kinds of payments?"
- "What fees will you be able to generate, if any?"
- "How will that add to your customer acquisition cost (CAC)?"
It answers none of them. Those are the right five questions, which is the point. A page that poses exactly what a buyer needs to know, then declines to answer, is the cleanest illustration of the gap we found.
What this means
Quote-gating is not a few providers being coy. In this sample it is the default, and the providers who write the buyer's guides are the same ones withholding the numbers.
The data
The audit: who discloses what
We read eight pages across seven domains and scored each against seven fee lines. Each cell is one of four states: publishes a figure, quote-gated, wrong buyer, or not applicable. The table lists one row per domain, because two of the eight pages come from the same domain and counting it twice would overstate the denominator. The methodology section sets out exactly which results were scored, which were excluded as a different BaaS, and which were left out for addressing a different question.
| Source | Type | Buy-side figures | Sourced? | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemba | BaaS vendor | Yes, ~29 figures | No, none attributed | Publishes, unsourced, and sells BaaS. Two of its articles are in the result set. |
| Unit | BaaS provider | None | n/a | Poses 5 pricing questions, answers 0 |
| Backbase | Banking software vendor | None | n/a | 7 of 7 pricing cells carry no rate |
| Branch | Workforce payments | None | n/a | Comparison content locked inside images |
| Koubaras | Consultancy | None | n/a | Promises pricing models, publishes none |
| Intellivon | Development agency | Yes, but build-side | Named, unlinked | Wrong buyer: cost to build a platform |
| SunTec | Banking software vendor | None | n/a | Wrong side: how banks price to their own customers |
| Fee line | Domains publishing a figure | Domains silent or category-only |
|---|---|---|
| Setup / implementation | 1 | 6 |
| Platform / monthly | 1 | 6 |
| Minimum commitment | 1 | 6 |
| Per-account | 0 | 7 |
| Per-transaction | 0 | 7 |
| Reserve | 0 | 7 |
| Revenue split | 0 | 7 |
Four of the seven lines that determine what you actually pay are disclosed numerically by nobody in the ranking set. Reserve is the most consequential omission, because a reserve is working capital you cannot deploy, and it does not appear on a single page.
Disambiguation
Is the cost to buy the same as the cost to build?
No. They are two different products with roughly a tenfold price difference, and they collide on the same results page. Cost to buy means licensing banking capability from a provider. Cost to build means paying engineers to construct a platform. One of the eight audited pages ranks for the buy query while answering the build one.
Intellivon's "Cost to Develop a Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) Platform in the USA" puts a US build at "about USD 150,000 for a focused MVP to around USD 500,000 for an enterprise-ready deployment", with ongoing operations "between $15,000 and $60,000 per month" (retrieved 2 August 2026). Those are credible numbers for a development contract. They are not what a platform pays a BaaS provider, and treating them as such inflates a buy-side budget by an order of magnitude.
SunTec's "Rethinking Pricing for the BaaS Era" is a third category again. It is addressed to banks deciding how to price their own services to customers, not to platforms buying from banks. We read all 21,000 characters of it and found no currency or percentage figure anywhere.
What this means
Three of the eight results answer a question the searcher did not ask. Check the buyer before you use anyone's number, including ours.
The stack
Which of the seven fee lines get hidden?
A BaaS quote is assembled from seven lines, and providers disclose them in inverse order of how much they cost you. Setup and platform fees are the ones occasionally published. Reserve, per-account, per-transaction and revenue split scale with your business, and no audited domain puts a number on any of them.
- Setup / implementation
- One-time, paid before you process anything.
- Platform / monthly
- The recurring access fee. Often carries a minimum.
- Per-account
- Charged per end-user account you open. Scales with growth.
- Per-transaction
- Charged per payment. Varies sharply by rail and by direction.
- Reserve
- Funds held against risk. Not a fee, but capital you cannot use.
- Minimum commitment
- The floor you pay regardless of volume.
- Revenue split
- The provider's share of interchange or fee income you generate.
The asymmetry is the point. The two lines that are fixed and predictable get published. The four that compound as you scale do not.
There is a tell worth knowing about. Unit's guide, which ranks first, publishes plenty of numbers, but every one is about revenue rather than cost: Shopify earning "more than 73% of their revenue from merchant solutions", Toast's lending business generating "$14M of revenue per year", interchange capture of 1.5% to 3%. It is a well-built page. It answers "how much will I make" while the reader is asking "how much will I pay".
The hidden layer
Which pass-through costs are left out of a first quote?
Beyond the seven contract lines sits a pass-through layer that rarely appears in a first quote: card production, ATM usage, KYC and KYB checks, fraud tooling, and FX spread. These are billed at cost or at a markup, and because they are variable they get deferred to a later conversation.
Only one audited domain puts figures on any of these, and the caveats below apply to all of it. For orientation on which lines exist rather than what they cost:
- Card production
- Physical cards cost more than most models assume, and metal cards materially more.
- ATM
- Per-withdrawal, often split between network and issuer.
- KYC and KYB
- Per-check, and business verification costs multiples of consumer verification.
- Fraud tooling
- Sometimes bundled into the platform fee, sometimes not. Ask which.
- FX spread
- A markup over the interbank mid-rate, and the easiest line to under-model on cross-border volume.
What this means
Ask for the pass-through schedule in writing at the same time as the headline quote. A provider who will not itemise it before signature will not itemise it after.
Reading the numbers
Why do the published figures disagree?
The one domain that publishes figures disagrees with itself, and understanding why matters more than the numbers do. Gemba is the only source in the set publishing buy-side rates. Three things about it are load-bearing.
1.It is a vendor, not an observer
Gemba sells BaaS. Its pricing article quotes "traditional" integration at heavy setup cost and long timelines, then presents its own platform as the thing that removes them. Its UK article publishes its own rate card in detail, including a £15 account review fee, zero monthly maintenance for UK companies, and partners retaining up to 70% of custom fee revenue. That is disclosure, but it is disclosure as marketing, and the competitor figures work as an anchor that makes the vendor's own price look small.
2.The bylines do not hold together
The domain's pricing article carries the author "AutoSEO" in its published metadata and shows no visible byline at all. Its ROI article carries that same "AutoSEO" metadata while the visible page credits "Alexander Legoshin" more than a dozen times, so the machine-readable author and the human-readable author contradict each other on one page. A third article is bylined "Gemba Team". Anyone can check this by viewing the page source and comparing the article:author meta tag against the byline printed on the page. One of the names attached to the only numeric source in this lane is an SEO automation tool.
3.The figures contradict each other
Within its single pricing article the domain gives setup cost as $50,000 to $200,000, as £25,000 to £100,000, and as £30,000 to £75,000. Those are three mutually inconsistent ranges for one line item, on one page. The same article asserts a UK banking licence capital requirement without a source. We are not repeating that figure, because a single unsourced vendor page is not a basis for a regulatory claim.
There is one more place buy-side numbers surface. A Q&A on sacra.com carries specific figures, a deposit account at "$10,000 a month" and a card programme at "an additional $5,000 a month". They come from an "Anonymous BaaS business development executive", the speaker prefaces them by saying "I wouldn't share any particular numbers", and full access to the site costs $50 a month. So the most concrete practitioner figures on the open web are anonymous, hedged by the speaker, and behind a paywall.
What this means
The spread between published BaaS prices is not ten independent sources disagreeing. It is one vendor, one development agency, and one anonymous interview measuring three different things. Any "average BaaS cost" you see quoted is likely derived from this same thin set.
Use this
Questions to put to a provider before signing
Because no public benchmark exists, your leverage comes from asking every provider the same questions in the same order and comparing the answers. These eleven cover the seven contract lines and the pass-through layer. Send them in writing.
The seven contract lines
- 1.What is the one-time setup or implementation fee, and what does it include?
- 2.What is the monthly platform fee, and does it change with volume?
- 3.Is there a per-account fee? Charged on open accounts or active accounts?
- 4.What is the per-transaction fee, by rail and by direction?
- 5.Is a reserve required? How much, held how long, and released on what trigger?
- 6.Is there a minimum monthly commitment, and when does it start?
- 7.What is the revenue split on interchange and on fees we generate?
The pass-through layer
- 8.What do physical and virtual cards cost per unit, including shipping?
- 9.What do KYC and KYB checks cost per check?
- 10.Is fraud tooling included in the platform fee or billed separately?
- 11.What is the FX markup over the interbank mid-rate, stated in basis points?
Two more decide the deal and are not fees: what the exit terms and data-portability obligations are, and which institution holds the funds. Get both in writing before signature.
Where we stand
How does Boldrails quote banking as a service?
Boldrails quotes against the same seven lines this page audits, and itemises every one in writing before you sign. We do not publish a rate card either, because pricing moves with volume, market and risk. What we commit to is that no line is withheld once we quote, including reserve and the pass-through schedule.
That is a commitment about disclosure, not a discount. The audit above measures one thing: whether a provider will tell you what the lines are. That is the part a buyer can actually hold a provider to, so it is the part we are willing to put in writing.
We left ourselves out of the census on purpose. The sample frame is the banking-relevant organic first page for the two queries, Boldrails does not rank there, and adding a row for ourselves would have broken the method. The table below is a commitment, not an audit result, and it is labelled that way.
| Fee line | Disclosed in the audited set | In a Boldrails quote |
|---|---|---|
| Setup / implementation | 1 of 7 domains | Itemised in writing, with what it covers |
| Platform / monthly | 1 of 7 domains | Itemised, with any volume trigger stated |
| Minimum commitment | 1 of 7 domains | Itemised, with the date it starts |
| Per-account | 0 of 7 domains | Itemised, and we state whether it is charged on open or on active accounts |
| Per-transaction | 0 of 7 domains | Itemised by rail and by direction |
| Reserve | 0 of 7 domains | Amount, hold period and release trigger, all stated |
| Revenue split | 0 of 7 domains | Itemised for interchange and for fees you generate |
| Pass-through schedule | Not scored in the census | Supplied alongside the headline quote, not after it |
Two more things decide the deal and are not fees: the exit terms with data-portability obligations, and which institution holds the funds. Both are answered in the same document. Boldrails holds the necessary licences required in the markets we serve, and onboarding takes 3 to 14 days, depending on your case.
Get a quote with all seven lines itemised
Tell us your monthly volume, your markets and your vertical. We come back with every line in the table above itemised, plus the pass-through schedule and the exit terms. Onboarding takes 3 to 14 days, depending on your case.
FAQ
Banking as a service pricing, answered
Last updated: 2 August 2026. Written by Claude Igrow.