Authorize.Net Fee Calculator: All-in-One vs Gateway Only

The formula is the same on both plans and only the inputs move. Monthly cost equals card volume times a percentage rate, plus transaction count times a per transaction fee, plus the monthly plan fee, plus the batch fee times the number of batches you settle. On All-in-One the percentage is 2.9%, the per transaction fee is $0.30, the plan fee is $25.00 and no daily batch fee is listed. On Payment Gateway Only the per transaction fee is $0.10, the plan fee is $25.00, the batch fee is $0.10 a day, and the percentage is whatever your own merchant account charges, which Authorize.Net neither sets nor publishes.

The Authorize.Net Fee Calculator folds the batch fee into the monthly plan line, because a per settled batch charge does not fit the three-line shape most fee calculators are built on. Ten cents across 250 US business days is $25.00 a year, which is $2.08 a month, so the gateway-only plans price at $27.08 rather than the advertised $25.00. On those plans you also pick the discount rate your own provider charges you, because without it the calculator can only tell you what Authorize.Net earns, not what a card payment costs you. Comparing 2.9% against 10 cents head to head is meaningless: one price buys a merchant account and a gateway, the other buys a gateway alone.

Switch to the single payment mode and the picture changes shape again, because the monthly fees vanish from a per sale view. A $120 card sale is $3.78 on All-in-One, an effective 3.15% on that one payment, and $2.80 at a 2.25% merchant account plus the gateway's 10 cents, an effective 2.33%. Authorize.Net's own share of that $120 sale on the gateway-only plan is exactly ten cents. Judge a single payment on the per sale numbers and a month on the blended effective rate; the verdict band under the monthly mode scores the blend, which is the number your statement actually shows.

A batch is the end of day handoff. During the day you authorize cards and capture the ones you intend to collect, but no money moves until the captured transactions are bundled and sent to the networks for settlement. Authorize.Net does that automatically every 24 hours, immediately after your transaction cut-off time, which defaults to 4:00 PM Pacific and produces one batch a day. On the gateway-only plans each settled batch costs 10 cents. That is the entire mechanism, and it is why the fee is invisible: it is a daily line item on a monthly statement, dwarfed by everything above it.

Annualize it and it stops being invisible. 2026 holds 261 weekdays, and all eleven federal holidays fall on a weekday, so a business that settles every US business day settles 250 batches and pays $25.00 a year. That is exactly one extra month of the $25.00 gateway fee, a thirteenth bill nobody budgets for. A business that settles seven days a week, which most retail and ecommerce operations do, settles up to 365 batches and pays $36.50. Because the charge is per settled batch, a day with no captured transactions should not produce one, so 250 is a planning ceiling rather than a guaranteed charge.

It deserves a line of its own because it does not scale with anything. $2.08 a month is 10.4 basis points of a $2,000 month and 0.52 basis points of a $40,000 month, so it is a rounding error for a busy merchant and a real cost for a small or seasonal one. There is also nothing to optimize: you cannot batch less often than once a day and still get paid on a normal cycle. Count it when you compare plans rather than trying to avoid it. If your statement shows a batch fee you do not recognize, check whether it is Authorize.Net's 10 cents or a separate settlement fee your acquirer charges, because both exist.

Authorize.Net states the position itself: the gateway-only plan requires an existing merchant account, and the processing rates on it are set by your merchant service provider. Authorize.Net moves the transaction, your acquirer prices it. That means the percentage column in this calculator's gateway-only plans is an assumption you supply from your own statement, not a published Authorize.Net rate, and the plan labels say so. Pick the option closest to the effective rate on your last statement and the total will be close; pick one at random and you have a number that looks authoritative and means nothing.

This is the distinction that separates a useful answer from a confident wrong one. Run the worked example both ways. Applying All-in-One's 2.9% to a gateway-only merchant gives $1,281.00 a month and claims Authorize.Net is charging it, when Authorize.Net is charging $59.08. Quoting only the gateway fees gives $59.08 and implies that is what accepting cards costs, when the real bill is $959.08. Both errors show up constantly on Authorize.Net pricing pages, and they are the same error: treating a gateway price list as a processing price list.

To find your real percentage, take your last merchant account statement, add every fee on it, and divide by the card volume it settled. That effective rate already includes interchange, assessments, your provider's markup and monthly minimums. If it lands over 3%, the gateway is still not your problem: a percentage point of markup on $40,000 a month is $400, against a total Authorize.Net bill of $59.08.

There is a crossover, and it is easy to state. At $40,000 a month across 320 sales, Payment Gateway Only plus your own merchant account is cheaper than All-in-One until your merchant account's discount rate passes about 3.05%. At that point $40,000 at 3.05% plus $32.00 plus $27.08 equals All-in-One's $1,281.00, and above it the bundled plan wins. The crossover moves with average ticket, because the 30 cent fee on All-in-One and the 10 cent fee on gateway only diverge fastest when you run many small transactions. Change the transaction count in the calculator and watch it move.

The published extras are unusually clean for this industry. Setup is $0.00. There is no contract and no cancellation fee published. Advanced Fraud Detection Suite and Customer Information Manager, the tokenized card on file vault, carry no monthly fee. Account Updater costs $0.25 per update, charged only when a card on file is actually refreshed. eCheck.Net, the ACH product, is 0.75% of the transaction with a $10.00 minimum monthly fee and a $3.00 returned item fee. All of it was read from the same price list on 5 September 2026.

The eCheck.Net minimum is the one to watch, because $10.00 divided by 0.75% is about $1,333 of monthly bank payment volume. Below that you pay the minimum rather than the rate, so a merchant collecting one $500 ACH invoice a month is paying $10.00 for a service that priced at $3.75. Above it the economics are excellent: a $5,000 B2B invoice costs $37.50 by eCheck.Net against $145.30 on an All-in-One card payment, a difference of $107.80 on a single invoice. If you send large invoices, the bank payment channel is worth more than any gateway negotiation you will ever have.

The bigger caveat is that Authorize.Net is heavily resold. Independent sales organizations bundle the gateway into their own offers and set their own prices for it, so the figures on your statement may not match the direct price list at all. If your gateway line reads $15 or $35 rather than $25, you are on a reseller's paper, and the number to compare is the total of everything the provider bills. The junk fee calculator linked below is built for that. That matters for continuity as much as pricing: Authorize.Net has been a Visa company since Visa completed its acquisition of CyberSource in 2010, so the entity setting the price list is not going anywhere.

Start with the blended effective rate the monthly mode reports. Under 2.25% is a good deal for a small US merchant and nothing here is worth your afternoon. Between 2.25% and 2.75% is typical, worth a look once a year. Above 3.2% something specific is wrong, and it is almost never the gateway. On the worked example the entire Authorize.Net bill is 0.15% of annual volume, so a merchant paying 3.4% has roughly 1.2 points of merchant account markup to argue about and 15 basis points of gateway to ignore.

One comparison decides the All-in-One question quickly. Authorize.Net's All-in-One card rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents, which is identical to Stripe's published US online rate, and Authorize.Net adds $25.00 a month on top of it while Stripe charges no monthly fee. On published rates alone, All-in-One is therefore Stripe plus $25.00 a month, or $300 a year, and the case for it has to be made on something other than price: an existing integration, the virtual terminal, recurring billing, a reseller relationship, or an acquirer that will actually underwrite you. If none of those apply and you are shopping purely on rate, All-in-One is not the answer.

Payment Gateway Only is a genuinely strong product for a specific merchant: one who already has a merchant account worth keeping, or who needs a specialist or high risk acquirer that a flat rate aggregator will not board. At $59.08 a month all in, you keep the ability to change acquirers without rebuilding your checkout, and that optionality is the real product.

The honest closing advice is that this page is usually a five minute check that tells you to leave the gateway alone. Fixing your merchant account rate is worth roughly ten times more than fixing your gateway: 40 basis points on $480,000 of annual card volume is $1,920, against a total gateway bill of $708.96. Run the monthly mode, note the effective rate, then take that number to the effective rate calculator and the savings calculator linked below and spend your negotiating energy on the percentage. The batch fee is worth counting. It is not worth switching over.