Midtrans

Midtrans is an Indonesian payment gateway founded in Jakarta in January 2012 as a joint venture between MidPlaza Group, Veritrans Inc of Japan and BEENOS. Gojek bought it in December 2017, alongside Kartuku and Mapan, and after Gojek merged with Tokopedia the company ended up inside GoTo Financial, the fintech arm of PT GoTo Gojek Tokopedia Tbk. The product itself is unglamorous and useful. One integration gives an Indonesian merchant roughly 25 payment channels: GoPay, QRIS, bank virtual accounts, credit cards and cash at Indomaret or Alfamart counters. Merchants connect through the hosted Snap checkout, the Core API, payment links, Android and iOS SDKs, or plugins for WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop and OpenCart.

Pricing and how it works

Midtrans publishes its whole rate card and charges nothing to register, integrate or stay connected. No setup fee, no monthly fee, no charge for the Core API. The only cost is per successful transaction. Bank transfer and virtual account payments cost a flat IDR 4,000 whatever the ticket size. QRIS is 0.7%, GoPay and ShopeePay are 2%, DANA and OVO are 1.5%, and cards on Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express and UnionPay cost 2.9% + IDR 2,000. Paylater is priced by provider, at 1.7% for Akulaku PayLater and 2% for Kredivo. Cash over the counter is IDR 5,000 at Alfamart, Alfamidi and DAN+DAN, and IDR 1,000 on top of the partner's own rate at Indomaret. Every figure excludes 11% VAT, charged on the fee rather than the sale, except on QRIS, GoPay and ShopeePay where the quoted rate already includes it. Payouts cost IDR 5,000 to a bank account or IDR 2,500 to GoPay. The money is not quick. A transaction has to sit at settled status for three business days before it can be withdrawn. After that a merchant can request a payout on any business day, or set a daily, weekly or monthly schedule that only fires once the balance clears IDR 50,000. Refunds and chargebacks carry no extra Midtrans fee, but the original transaction fee is not given back.

Who it is for

Indonesian online sellers, marketplaces and subscription businesses that need QRIS and GoPay to convert as well as cards do. Ticket size, not volume, is the first thing to model here. The flat IDR 4,000 virtual account fee is generous on a large basket and brutal on a small one: at an average order of IDR 30,000 that single channel costs over 13%, while at IDR 500,000 it costs under 1%. Merchants selling low-value digital goods should push buyers towards QRIS.

What Midtrans is not

It is not a cross-border gateway. Midtrans processes in Indonesian rupiah only, under Bank Indonesia regulation, so a merchant pricing in dollars has to convert before sending the charge request and wears the currency risk itself. It is also not open to all comers. Activating an account means submitting Indonesian legal and tax documents: a KTP and NPWP for a sole trader, or a deed of establishment, the Ministry of Law and Human Rights decree, a director's KTP or passport, a company NPWP and an NIB for a PT or CV. Foreign-owned entities can register, but they still need an Indonesian tax ID and a director holding a KITAS or KITAP. A global merchant that wants Indonesian methods without an Indonesian entity needs a cross-border aggregator instead.