NETbilling Review & 4 Alternatives (2026)

NETbilling is a US payment gateway plus merchant account brokerage out of Valencia, California, running since 1998 under the same founder-CEO, Mitch Farber. In this industry, 28 years under one name and one owner is the single most informative data point I can give you. This is not an IPSP like CCBill or Epoch -- you get your own merchant account through their network of acquiring banks (they claim partnerships with dozens, across the US, Canada and the EU), and their gateway sits on top handling cards and ACH/online checks. That distinction matters: you own the customer data, you set your own descriptor, and you negotiate your own rates. It also means you, not them, eat the chargebacks. Their homepage claims roughly 9,000 new merchant accounts a year and 970,000 fraudulent charges prevented annually -- vendor numbers, but consistent with a processor that never left the high-risk space.

Here is the part that will annoy you: NETbilling publishes no pricing. Not a percentage, not a per-transaction fee, not a monthly minimum -- everything is a custom quote based on volume and risk. Third-party directories list e-commerce rates starting around 1.4% + $0.06, but that figure appears nowhere on netbilling.com, so treat it as hearsay until your quote lands. What they do publish: merchants get deposits on "over 300 pay days per year", which in practice means daily settlement -- genuinely better than the weekly or net-15 cycles adult IPSPs run. Reserves are set per-merchant by the acquirer; they don't publish typical percentages, which is normal but worth pinning down in writing. For webmasters referring others, the agent program pays a 10-15% residual of NETbilling's total monthly gross from each referred merchant, plus $10 per gateway per month, with web referrals "tracked through our website indefinitely". Referred merchants also get the setup fee cut to $99. No payout schedule or minimum is published for agents -- ask before you build a funnel on it.

The gateway is clearly built by people who ran adult sites: NATS integration is named on their own pages, alongside member management, retention tools, and cross-sell/upsell hooks at the point of sale -- the toolkit of a subscription-site operator, not a generic SaaS processor. Fraud control is the headline feature. AVS and CVV2 come standard, the scrubbing rules are tunable per-merchant rather than a black box, and they explicitly market keeping you under Visa's VAMP thresholds -- the metric that actually gets adult merchants terminated in 2026. Reporting is granular with a virtual terminal and recurring billing built in. Where it falls short of affiliate-network standards: agent referral tracking is an assigned ID plus banners or a co-branded page NETbilling hosts for you. No postback documentation, no SubID breakdowns, no real-time referral stats are published. For a gateway that's fine; for someone monetising traffic against the agent program, it's 2005-era tracking.

Support is where NETbilling earns its keep. They run 24/7/365 phone and email support from their own office -- and because they also sell call-centre services as a product, you can pay them to answer your customers' billing and cancellation calls too, which directly suppresses chargebacks. They claim 99.999% uptime on the gateway; I can't independently audit that, but I found no forum threads about extended NETbilling outages, which for a 28-year-old processor is itself notable. The public review record is thin but positive: 4.6/5 on Trustpilot from just 23 reviews, with praise concentrated on rates versus Stripe/Square and on reachable humans, and the few complaints centring on billing and cancellation friction. A BBB profile exists, staff tenure is long (their controller joined in 2003), and the company has never been through an acquisition or rebrand. Boring, in the best sense.

Get a quote from NETbilling if you're a US, Canadian or EU operation doing real volume -- paysites, fan-platform clones, cam or AI-content billing -- and you've outgrown the 10-15% all-in cut of an IPSP. With your own merchant account, the effective rate on a custom quote should land far below that, and daily settlement beats anyone's net terms. Skip them if you're pre-revenue or outside their banking footprint: a merchant account means underwriting, KYC, possible reserves, and personal liability for chargebacks, and with no published pricing you can't even window-shop. The agent program is a reasonable side-earner if you already send operators their way -- 10-15% lifetime residual is competitive -- but the absence of published payout terms means I'd confirm the schedule by email before promoting it.