Top 6 Stripe alternatives for lower UK payment fees (2026)

Six UK providers publish a rate that undercuts Stripe on at least one way of getting paid: Access PaySuite, Adfin, GoCardless, London & Zurich, Modulr, plus PayPal. Whether any of them saves you money depends on how your customers pay you. Stripe's 1.5% + 20p is its consumer card rate, and if you invoice other businesses you're paid largely on the cards it prices at 2.8% + 20p.

In this article

The short version

• Stripe prices your cards by card type. Standard covers "Consumer cards issued by Visa, Mastercard, and other major providers" at 1.5% + 20p; premium covers "Commercial, corporate, or business cards issued by Visa and Mastercard" at 2.8% + 20p, in a Stripe support article.
• Stripe Invoicing adds 0.4% or 0.5% per paid invoice on top: "Stripe Invoicing has no fixed fees or setup costs, but Stripe Payments pricing will apply."
• Bacs through Stripe is 1% capped at £4, plus £4.00 for a failed payment and £5.00 for a disputed one.
• Stripe publishes 125+ payment methods and 99.999% historical uptime, and it documents its mandate-import review where most providers, us included, publish nothing.
• One page in this set states an effective date: PayPal's, "Last Updated: 15 July 2026".

Where Stripe's card fees land

Stripe prices a card by which card your customer hands over. Its labelled UK rows are "Domestic cards" at 1.5% + 20p and "International cards" at 3.15% + 20p, with EEA cards at 2.5% + 20p in the prose beside them, plus 2% "if currency conversion is required".

What decides your bill is the standard against premium split, defined in a support article. Standard domestic cards are "Consumer cards issued by Visa, Mastercard, and other major providers". Premium domestic cards are "Commercial, corporate, or business cards issued by Visa and Mastercard", classified "based on information from card networks at the point of capture". So the headline 1.5% belongs to your consumer customers, and invoice a limited company and you'll often be paid on a company card at 2.8% + 20p.

Stripe Invoicing then stacks on top: 0.4% per paid invoice on Starter, 0.5% on Plus, with the page stating that "Stripe Invoicing has no fixed fees or setup costs, but Stripe Payments pricing will apply". Our arithmetic on a £1,000 invoice on Starter: a consumer card costs you £19.20 all in, or 1.92%, and a business card £32.20, or 3.22%.

Bacs adds two fees the main pricing page leaves out. On the local payment methods page, Bacs Direct Debit runs at 1% with a 20p minimum and a £4.00 cap, then £4.00 per failed payment and £5.00 per disputed payment. A £4.00 failure fee equals the whole capped collection fee on a £400 invoice, so if your mandates fail at any real rate your failures can cost more than your collections.

At a glance: published UK rates

Rates as published on each provider's own page. Pence pricing and percentage pricing don't compare without an invoice value, so read that first column as a starting point.

1. Access PaySuite

The payments arm of The Access Group, an FCA payment institution quoting firm reference 730815 on its own accreditations page, and a direct debit specialist.

• Pricing: "From 8p per transaction" for smaller businesses, "No setup fees", with a worked example of 500 payments a month at £30 average value costing "around £215/month". Its SmartDebit brand page says "transaction fees from just 4p" at the same time, so both figures are theirs and we quote both.
• Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 from 346 (user-reported). Its own site displays 4.7 from 369.
• If you're comparing rates, read the contract too. Access PaySuite's own pricing page says "No commitment", while the Terms and Conditions V5 of April 2026 on the same site set a 12-month initial term, "not less than 90 days' prior Notice", an early termination fee "equal to the previous three months invoiced by Us", plus a reserve of "a minimum of 25% of the average monthly Client Collections" held six months after you go.

2. Adfin

A UK platform that collects your invoices by direct debit, card, wallet, open banking or bank transfer, then chases whatever goes unpaid.

• Pricing: 1.0% + 20p per successful transaction, with an industry tier at 1.5% + 20p and no qualifying condition stated on the page. Bank payments and direct debits capped at £4, premium or EEA cards plus 1%, non-EEA cards plus 2%, and 0.15% on the part of a direct debit over £2,000. Accountants and Bookkeepers Club members pay 0% + 20p.
• On cards: a business card here is 1.0% + 1% + 20p, against 2.8% + 20p through Stripe.
• Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 from 12 (user-reported). Twelve reviews won't settle anything for you.
• Limitation: no euro or dollar collection, so your multi-currency work belongs with Stripe. Our page states no VAT position either.

3. GoCardless

Bank debit only, with the most complete self-serve rate card in UK direct debit and the best published exit terms in this market.

• Pricing: Standard 1% + 20p capped at £4, Advanced 1.25% + 20p capped at £5, Pro 1.4% + 20p capped at £5.60, plus 0.3% on the part of a direct debit over £2,000. Your name on your payer's statement is a £50 monthly add-on.
• Failures: its support page states "Failure fees only apply in the US, Germany and Austria", so on the published record a UK failure costs you nothing. Set that beside Stripe's £4.00.
• VAT: the only provider here that tells you its position, saying "we need to charge VAT on all transaction fees invoiced to UK merchants". If you can't recover it, 1% + 20p is 1.2% + 24p.
• Reviews: Trustpilot 2.5 from 2,369 against G2 4.6 from 321 (user-reported). Either alone would mislead you, so here are both.
• Limitation: no cards, no wallets, no invoicing and no chasing sequence, so you keep a card acquirer alongside.

4. London & Zurich

Thirty years in UK direct debit, FCA authorised under number 712747, sold on a UK team you can telephone and an account manager named in their own customer testimonials.

• Pricing: indicative tiers only. Foundation on a shared Service User Number at "Pricing around 1%", Business with a branded SUN "from 0.5% or 20p", plus banded Enterprise pricing. Their "0.5% or 20p" wording doesn't say whether the 20p is a floor, an alternative or an addition, so get your rate in writing.
• No cap appears on any tier. Our arithmetic on their wording: around 1% uncapped on a £3,000 fee note is roughly £30, against £4 capped. On a migration they notify your payers for you: "We will then use that to send out a Notification of Change, a Bacs-compliant communication document". Stripe asks you to do that yourself and GoCardless gives you a template.
• Reviews: none retrievable. Trustpilot returned 403 on every mirror we tried and no G2 or Capterra listing exists.
• The counterweight: no customer terms are published anywhere on the site and /terms-and-conditions/ returns a 404, so you can't read the minimum term, the notice period, the exit fee or your data rights before you sign.

5. Modulr

An electronic money institution selling accounts and payments, whose published prices cover money going out and not money coming in.

• Pricing: Bronze £30 a month for 80 payments, Silver £110 for 500, Platinum £500 for 3,000. Those are outbound payment plans.
• Collecting a direct debit appears in no published plan. Its collections page argues for a "Flat per-collection rate" against competitors' "Costs that scale with transaction value" and attaches no figure anywhere.
• The pitch is your own Service User Number and your own name on your payer's statement, so budget for bank sponsorship as well as software.
• Reviews: Trustpilot 4.5 from 130 (user-reported). Its single G2 review gives you a count and not a score.
• Limitation: its terms let Modulr "withdraw the Direct Debit Mandate Service by giving the Introduced Client at least 2 months' notice", and describe no bulk change route and no data export.

6. PayPal

A card and wallet acquirer with an invoicing front end, and the one provider here whose fee page tells you when your rates last changed.

• Pricing: "All Other Commercial Transactions" at 2.9% plus a 0.30 GBP fixed fee, and 1.2% + 30p where your payer is a card-funded non-account-holder under PayPal's Terms for Payments. Add 1.29% for an EEA sender or 1.99% elsewhere, plus 3% above the base rate on conversion (its page carries "Last Updated: 15 July 2026").
• Invoicing carries no rate of its own: "PayPal Invoicing has no setup or monthly fees", and a paid invoice is charged at the ordinary commercial rate. Stripe works the other way round.
• Disputes cost more here than anywhere else on this page: £14.00 per chargeback and £12.00 per dispute claim, or £24.00 on the high-volume tariff.
• What PayPal brings you that no UK collections platform can: "400M+ active accounts", "more than 200 markets", 140 currencies, plus Fastlane guest checkout. Its page makes no conversion claim, so we won't make one for it.
• Limitation for a UK invoicing business: you cannot collect by Bacs Direct Debit through PayPal. Its UK fee page carries no direct debit row, and Braintree's direct debit support is SEPA euro-only.

What these pages do not publish

Absences are checkable, and most comparison pages skip them.

• Stripe's VAT position on its own fees. "VAT" appears once on its UK pricing page, describing Stripe Tax. Its global tax page says Stripe doesn't charge VAT on fees to European account holders outside a named list of jurisdictions, and the UK is absent from that list, though never addressed by name. Check your own invoice.
• An effective date on any of Stripe's three UK pricing pages. Not one carries one, and across every pricing page behind this comparison PayPal's is the only dated example, 15 July 2026.
• Stripe's Bacs timing and limits. Its Bacs documentation returned 404 twice, so you can't verify settlement timing or charge limits from Stripe.
• One rate for Access PaySuite. Two of its pages give 4p and "From 8p" at the same time, and its £215 example carries about £175 a month it doesn't itemise.
• Any cap from London & Zurich, and any customer contract from them at all.
• Any Modulr price for collecting your direct debits, and any accountant price from anybody here.
• Adfin's VAT treatment, chargeback fee, phone payment fee, credit control charge and own-name monthly fee. Not one is on adfin.com/pricing, so none is quoted above.

Where Stripe is the stronger product

Staying put is a real answer, and on several tests Stripe is ahead of everything above.

• Breadth. Its payment methods page publishes "125+ payment methods", covering Bacs and SEPA direct debit, wallets, plus buy-now-pay-later. Nothing in UK collections is close.
• Reliability, published: "99.999% historical uptime for Stripe services".
• Products with no UK collections equivalent: Connect for marketplace payouts, Issuing for cards you issue yourself, Terminal for in-person, Tax for VAT automation. Its API reference is the standard the rest of us get measured against.
• Mandate migration, where Stripe is better than us and you'd find that out anyway. Stripe documents its import review: "Stripe reviews the data received from your current processor and identifies any problems with the import. We work with you and your current processor to correct any issues. We then share a summary of the import for your final review and approval." GoCardless, London & Zurich and Access PaySuite publish nothing equivalent, and Adfin's own answer asks you to compare the lists yourself.

If you sell internationally, take cards at volume, run a marketplace or employ engineers, not one of the six above replaces what you already have.

What leaving Stripe involves

Stripe's contract and Stripe's documentation answer this differently, and you want both.

The Stripe Services Agreement, effective 18 November 2025, sets no minimum term and no exit fee, and you close your account from the Dashboard. Section 4.4 then says "Stripe is not obligated to retain data that it receives from or through User after the Term", so you're granted no post-termination export right.

Its documentation describes the export anyway, at no stated charge: "A Bacs export migration takes approximately 6-8 weeks to complete", requested through the support migrations form, after which "Stripe provides you with a signed bulk change deed". Read only the contract and you'd think the process didn't exist; read only the docs and you wouldn't know it's discretionary.

Before you move, count your live mandates, list your scheduled payments and agree who tells your payers.

How to choose

How we compared these

Every figure came from the provider's own page, and each of those pages is listed in the sources below so you can check it against what you see today. Where a provider publishes no price we say so instead of estimating. Review scores are third-party, quoted with their count and their platform; where two platforms disagree you get both.

The six are listed alphabetically. No independent UK ranking of payment providers exists, every "best" page currently ranking is vendor-published, and this one is published by Adfin, so any order would be our opinion dressed as a finding. Apart from PayPal's, these pages won't tell you when their prices last changed, so re-read them before you commit.

See what your own card mix would cost. Book a demo, or read Adfin pricing.

Common questions

Is any UK provider cheaper than Stripe on cards? On published rates, Adfin's 1.0% + 20p undercuts Stripe's 1.5% + 20p on a standard UK card, and the gap widens on a company card, where Adfin adds 1% and Stripe charges 2.8% + 20p. PayPal's standard commercial rate is higher than both.

Why did Stripe charge me 2.8% on a card payment? Because it was classified as a premium card. Stripe defines premium domestic cards as "Commercial, corporate, or business cards issued by Visa and Mastercard", against standard cards described as "Consumer cards issued by Visa, Mastercard, and other major providers", classified "based on information from card networks at the point of capture".

Does Stripe Invoicing cost extra on top of the payment fee? Yes. Stripe Invoicing is 0.4% per paid invoice on Starter and 0.5% on Plus, and its pricing page states that "Stripe Invoicing has no fixed fees or setup costs, but Stripe Payments pricing will apply". PayPal Invoicing carries no separate rate.

What does Stripe charge when a direct debit fails? £4.00 per failed payment and £5.00 per disputed payment, both on its local payment methods page. GoCardless publishes that failure fees apply only in the US, Germany and Austria, so on its published record a UK failure carries no fee.

Do Stripe's fees include VAT? Stripe's UK pricing page states no VAT position. Its global tax page says it doesn't charge VAT on fees to European account holders outside a named list of jurisdictions, and the UK is absent from that list without being addressed by name anywhere. GoCardless says plainly that it charges VAT on transaction fees to UK merchants.

How current are these prices? Only one page here states an effective date, PayPal's "Last Updated: 15 July 2026". Every other price in this comparison could have changed the day after we checked it, so read the provider's own page before you commit.

Sources

• Access PaySuite — direct debit pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Adfin — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• GoCardless — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• London & Zurich — pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Modulr — pricing for business (accurate as of August 2026)
• PayPal — UK business fees (accurate as of August 2026)
• Stripe — UK pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Stripe — Invoicing pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Stripe — local payment method pricing (accurate as of August 2026)
• Stripe — the difference between standard and premium cards (accurate as of August 2026)

Adfin is one of the six providers compared here and Adfin publishes this article, so weigh our entry accordingly and read the source pages yourself. All competitor pricing is that provider's own published pricing; no page in this set carries an effective date except PayPal's, and providers change prices, so check before you commit. Review scores are third-party and quoted with their counts. Last updated August 2026.