Every gateway will quote you a rate. None of them will quote you what a dispute costs, what leaving costs, or what you actually pay on UPI. We read the whole contract before you sign it — and we show you our own fee while we do it.
Payleaf Solutions is not a Payment Aggregator and is not authorised by the Reserve Bank of India. We never hold, pool or settle merchant funds.
Every merchant onboarded before 31 Dec 2025 has to meet full due diligence by 15 September 2026 — PA Directions ¶13(j). Your aggregator is going to ask for documents again, and its support queue is about to get very long.
You were quoted a percentage. That percentage is the only one of these that appears on a pricing page — and it is not the one that decides what you keep.
The only number in the conversation. Published, comparable, and the one everybody negotiates.
PublishedEvery headline rate in India is quoted before tax. Your 2% is 2.36%. Nobody quotes it inclusive, so every comparison you have ever made was made on the wrong number.
PublishedZero MDR is a cap on the merchant discount rate. It is not a promise the transaction is free. Platform and technology fees are a separate line, are charged on UPI, and are published — one major aggregator publishes 2%. For most Indian merchants UPI is the majority of volume.
Published — go and read itRefund a customer and the fee on the original sale is not reversed. Neither is the GST on it. One aggregator's documentation says so; another's contract says fees apply irrespective of refunds. At a 10% return rate on ₹1 crore monthly, that is roughly ₹20,000 a month on sales you did not make.
In the terms, not the pricing pageCharged per dispute, win or lose — a successful defence does not refund the fee. We checked every dispute page and every set of terms at the four largest aggregators. Not one publishes the amount. You cannot find out what it costs to be falsely accused until it happens.
Not published by anyoneA percentage of every settlement, held back. No provider publishes the percentage, the hold period, or which categories trigger one. It is set individually at underwriting — which means you find out after you have applied, and it is negotiable only if you know to ask.
Not published by anyoneSame-day settlement costs a percentage of the settlement. Most providers quote it after onboarding, after underwriting, or after a sales conversation — not on the page where you compared them.
Quoted after you commitThree of those seven are not published by any major aggregator. Two of the four biggest publish no rate card at all — one pricing page carries no figures, and another states that pricing is shared by email after you sign up. That is not an accusation against anyone. It is how this market is built, and it means you cannot price-compare before you commit.
Don't take our word for it. Open your provider's pricing page and search for platform fee. Then open the terms and search for refund. We'll wait.
Custom pricing conversations begin above ₹5 lakh monthly GMV at one major aggregator — its own published guidance, June 2026. Another publishes ₹10 lakh. A third treats ₹20 lakh as the line. Above it, your rate is negotiated. And negotiated pricing is confidential to both sides, so there is no public number to check yourself against.
Neither of them knows it is competing. You get two list-adjacent quotes and the feeling of having shopped around. The market leader's own negotiation guide tells merchants to arrive with six months of clean data and two competing written offers — that is the market leader confirming a single relationship cannot produce a market price.
Your rate is one data point, and it is the only one you will ever see. We place volume across several RBI-authorised aggregators. When we ask, they are answering each other — not you.
Show you what any partner quoted. Their pricing is confidential under our agreements with them — and yours is confidential in exactly the same way, which is the part that protects you.
Which partners we approached, which passed, which quoted, and why we picked the one we did. In writing. With our margin as a separate line.
We don't claim the lowest rates in the market. No channel partner can. Every one of us prices above a floor the aggregator sets, so anyone promising you the cheapest rate in India is promising something their own partner agreement does not let them guarantee. What we can do is run the comparison and show you the number — including ours.
Signing up is designed to be frictionless. Leaving is not. Almost everything that makes it hard is decided on day one, before you know enough to ask.
RBI makes a card token unique to the combination of card, token requestor and merchant — and separately forbids merchants, aggregators and gateways from storing the card number itself. Put those together: change provider and every saved card has to be collected again, from the customer, with fresh consent and a fresh OTP. There is one way out — becoming your own token requestor with the card networks — and it is gated behind PCI DSS compliance. That is a day-one decision, not a day-800 one.
RBI card-on-file tokenisation, 7 Sept 2021 & 23 Dec 2021A mandate is created once, with the customer present and authenticating. Published gateway documentation states plainly that an existing mandate cannot be passed to a new subscription and cannot be updated. If you bill recurring, who owns your mandates is the most expensive question you will ever fail to ask.
Published PSP documentation, India recurring paymentsUnder ¶13(e) of the PA Directions 2025, your aggregator allots your merchant category code. The card networks make correct assignment the acquirer's obligation and reserve the right to require corrections. Changing it runs merchant → processor → network, takes weeks, and can be refused. That code sets your rate band, your risk treatment and whether some categories will take you at all — for the life of the account.
RBI PA Directions 2025 ¶13(e) · Visa Merchant Data Standards Manual, Apr 2026Published industry migration guidance puts a full move at four to eight weeks — token migration alone two to four, webhooks rebuilt, reconciliation logic rewritten for different field names and settlement formats. Then you keep the old account live for 30 to 60 days for refunds and chargebacks. Two providers, one set of sales.
Industry migration guidance, April 2026Two RBI-authorised aggregators publish, in their standard terms, a right to hold settlement for at least 180 days after termination — one of them phrased as at least that, or longer at its discretion. A third publishes no post-termination period at all, which is arguably worse: an unstated, unbounded tail.
Published aggregator terms — search yours for “termination”The card networks run global terminated-merchant files. Every processor is required to check them before onboarding, and to file within one business day of closing an account. The trigger is low — 1% chargebacks in a single month over a modest threshold. What gets recorded includes the company's tax ID and the principal owner's name and tax ID. Records persist five years. Winning the chargebacks back does not remove you. Most merchants find out when they try to sign up somewhere else.
Card network terminated-merchant file rulesUntil September 2025, RBI prescribed when you had to be paid — timelines pegged to shipment, delivery and refund windows. The PA Directions 2025 deleted that regime. Settlement timing is now purely a matter of contract, subject only to being fair, equitable and transparently stated.
Which means your T+2 is a term you agreed to, not a protection you hold. One published set of terms reads “within two bank working days, whichever is higher.” Since September 2025 the contract is the only protection there is — and almost nobody reads it before signing. That is now most of what we do.
None of this is a reason to panic. It is a reason to get the first decision right, because it is the one you cannot take back cheaply. That is the whole job.
Not a quiz that ends in a sales call. It works out your actual requirements — the ones that are hard to change later — and tells you what to insist on before you sign anything.
This drives your merchant category code, which sets your rate band for the life of the account.
This is a fit assessment, not an approval. Every payment aggregator makes its own onboarding decision, every time, and nobody can promise you otherwise. What this tells you is which door is worth knocking on and what to have ready when you do.
First store, first payment setup. Pick the wrong merchant category code now and you'll be arguing about held settlements in month three. We'll set it up properly and show you the real cost — including the 18% GST nobody quotes.
You signed once and never went back. That's the default, and the whole industry is priced around it. Send us six months of statements and we'll put a number on it — fees, GST, refund leakage, chargebacks, the lot.
Travel, subscriptions, digital goods, supplements, advance-fee education. Perfectly lawful, routinely repriced and reserved against. We'll tell you what to fix before you apply — and if nobody will take you, we'll say that too.
Custom pricing conversations typically start above ₹5 lakh monthly GMV — that's Razorpay's own published guidance from June 2026, not our marketing. Under that number you get the public rate card and a polite no. We go in with a whole book behind us, and you'll see in writing which partners quoted, which passed, and why we picked the one we did.
Source: Razorpay pricing guide, 9 June 2026December 2022: RBI told two major aggregators to stop onboarding. September 2023: it rejected or returned 72 applications. Switching takes one to four months, and you find that out on the day you need it. We keep a second introduction warm and your document pack ready, so a bad week doesn't become a bad quarter.
Concentration risk, twice in four yearsCategory, merchant category code, documentation. That's what decides it, and it's all fixable before you apply. To be direct: we can't get you approved. The aggregator decides, every time, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. What we can do is make sure the decision is made on a complete file instead of a thin one.
Approval is always the aggregator's decisionA named escalation contact at every aggregator we work with, a published median first-response time, and a status update every single day until your issue closes. We commit to response and escalation. We won't promise outcomes we don't control — and be suspicious of anyone who does.
Response times published monthlyWe aren't a payment aggregator, we aren't RBI-authorised, and we never touch your money. We're paid out of the aggregator's fee on your volume — and where our margin sits inside your rate, the proposal shows the base rate and our cut on separate lines. Ask any other intermediary in this market the same question and watch what happens.
See “Our margin”Monthly GMV below which you don't get a pricing conversation at all — you get the rate card.
Razorpay, published pricing guide, 9 June 2026How much more a five-point success-rate gain is worth than a 0.2pp rate cut, at ₹1 crore monthly GMV. Most people negotiate the wrong number.
Razorpay, published pricing guide, 9 June 2026Aggregator applications rejected or returned by RBI in one month, affecting an estimated three million merchants.
RBI, 27 September 2023To move gateways, plus 30–60 days running both in parallel — and two aggregators publish a right to hold your settlement 180 days after you leave.
Industry migration guidance & published aggregator terms, 2026Facilitating payments for online money games is a criminal offence under the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act 2025. Since the 2026 Rules, everyone in the payment chain carries a positive duty to verify registration before facilitating. We'll say no to that money, and we'll say it on the record rather than in a footnote.
We also don't work with
The aggregator decides. Always. What we can do is tell you what documentation to expect, what reserve terms are normal, what to fix first, and a straight read on your odds. If nobody authorised will take your category, you'll hear it on the first call — not after six weeks and an invoice.
We're paid out of the aggregator's fee on the volume you process. There's no separate Payleaf invoice — but "the aggregator pays us, not you" is the half-truth this industry runs on, so let's finish the sentence.
Our margin usually sits inside your rate. The aggregator sets a floor, you're quoted above it, and the gap is us. So here is the gap, in rupees, on your volume.
Illustrative only. Real figures depend on your category, volume, risk profile and the aggregator's underwriting. Card rates shown; on bank-funded UPI and RuPay debit there is legally no merchant fee in India today.
Every proposal shows the aggregator's base rate and our margin on separate lines. Ask us what we make on your account and you'll get a number, not a speech.
Want the conflict gone entirely? Take the aggregator's base rate direct and pay us a flat advisory fee instead. Some merchants prefer it. Tell us which you want and we'll structure it that way.
Money moves customer → the authorised aggregator's RBI-mandated escrow account → your bank. We are not a stop on that route. Your payment contract is with the aggregator. Fire us tomorrow and your settlements keep landing — you'd just lose the person arguing on your behalf.
¶16(b) of the PA Directions deems that escrow account a designated payment system under s.23A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, which gives the people entitled to those funds a first charge ranking ahead of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. That protects you if the aggregator fails. It will not protect you from a regulatory freeze — a different risk, and the reason we keep a second relationship open for you.
Every rail above is available through the aggregators we work with. The acquiring bank behind each one is appointed by the aggregator and is the entity RBI holds to the debit-card rate caps; escrow sits with a scheduled commercial bank under PA Directions ¶16. We are on neither side of that — which is exactly why we can argue with both.
Payleaf Solutions Private Limited (CIN U62099DL2024PTC437900) is not a Payment Aggregator and is not authorised, licensed or registered by the Reserve Bank of India. Payleaf provides payments placement and merchant support services. All payment processing, settlement and handling of funds is carried out by RBI-authorised Payment Aggregators and their partner banks. Payleaf does not collect, pool, hold or settle merchant funds at any point. Your funds are settled from the authorised aggregator's RBI-mandated escrow account directly to your own bank account. Your contract for payment services is with the aggregator. Rates, transaction limits and settlement timelines are set by, and subject to the approval of, the relevant aggregator and its acquiring bank.
How we are paid: Payleaf is paid out of the aggregator's fee on the volume you process. Where our margin is built into your rate rather than paid separately, your proposal shows the aggregator's base rate and our margin as separate lines.
No deck, no discovery call, no "let's explore synergies". Six months of settlement statements and one conversation, and you get back a written, line-by-line read of what you actually pay — and if your current setup beats anything we can place you on, we write that down and go away.
We only get paid if you move. That is exactly why we show you the margin — so you can check our advice against our incentive instead of taking it on trust.
Free. One working day. No obligation.
We'll come back within one working day with what we need to run the numbers. If we can't improve on your setup, that's what the reply will say.