Payment Processing for SaaS, VPN and Hosting

The product is live, the first few hundred subscriptions are running, and the payment application comes back with «additional review required». Nothing is wrong with the business. Subscriptions, digital delivery and free trials are simply read differently on the risk side than a shop that ships boxes.

Payment processing for SaaS, VPN and hosting is an ordinary vertical. It gets approved every day. It is priced and documented differently, that is all. Here is what changes, what it costs, and what the application actually needs from you.

Why subscriptions are read as elevated risk

Three properties do it, and they arrive as a set.

There is no delivery proof. A parcel has a tracking number; access to a dashboard has a line in a log. When a customer disputes the charge, the evidence is weaker by default.
The charge repeats. One sale disputed once is an incident. A monthly charge disputed in month seven is a pattern, and it is patterns that get counted.
Trials convert quietly. The most common dispute in this vertical is not fraud at all. It is a customer who forgot the trial ends and sees an unfamiliar line on the statement.

None of that blocks an account. It decides the rate, the reserve and how much paperwork onboarding asks for. A merchant account for a subscription product is a normal product on its own terms, not a favour granted to you.

The recurring side of this has its own write-up. How subscription revenue is assessed and what keeps it approved is in our piece on merchant accounts for subscription businesses.

Four contract words, in plain language

MDR stands for merchant discount rate — the percentage kept from each successful card payment. It is not one company’s margin: it splits between the customer’s issuing bank, the card scheme and the acquirer. Ours runs 3%–5% depending on the type of business, and the exact figure is set per merchant. We consider individual solutions for your business.

Settlement is when the money actually reaches your account. T+7 means the seventh day after the transaction, not the same evening. Cash-flow planning for a subscription product starts at this line, because renewals arrive daily while payroll does not.

Rolling reserve is a share of turnover held back for a fixed period against future disputes and then released on schedule. Ours is 10% for 180 days. It is your money delayed, not a fee, and its size follows your dispute ratio. The thresholds the card schemes watch are in our piece on VAMP guidelines for high-risk merchants.

Chargeback is a dispute the customer files through their own bank instead of contacting you. It costs 100,00 EUR per case on top of the returned amount, while a refund you issue yourself costs 50,00 EUR. The gap between those two numbers is the entire business case for a visible cancel button.

What it costs

Five lines matter for a subscription product, and each one matters more here than in ordinary retail.

Per-transaction fee — 0,50 EUR. Fixed, so it weighs on small tickets. On a nine-euro monthly plan it takes a larger share than the percentage does. Annual billing changes this arithmetic more than any negotiation over the rate ever will.
Rate — 3%–5%, by type of business.
Settlement in EUR over SEPA — 0,20%.
Settlement term T+7, rolling reserve 10% for 180 days. Together these decide how much cash sits outside your account at any moment.
Refund 50,00 EUR, chargeback 100,00 EUR.

Every published line sits on the pricing page.

The acceptance side — gateway, card routes, recurring charges — is described under payment processing. Ready plugins cover WordPress and OpenCart; everything else connects through the API or a payment link.

What the application asks for

The company set is standard: registration, articles, beneficiaries, licences where the activity requires them. The vertical-specific part is what usually decides the outcome.

A working site where the offer is visible without logging in. Prices, what is included, who the seller is, how to reach support.
Terms and a refund policy that match the checkout. The most common rejection is not a hard no. It is a policy page promising fourteen days while the checkout page promises nothing.
Trial terms written out. How long it runs, the price after, when the card is charged, how to cancel.
Ownership of domain and infrastructure. For hosting and VPN specifically: whose capacity you resell and under which agreement.
Processing history, if there is any. Volumes, dispute rate, and why the previous arrangement ended. Silence here reads worse than a bad number.

If the application comes back refused rather than merely delayed, the next steps are a separate matter. They are in our piece on what to do when an application for card acceptance is declined.

Recurring billing that does not leak

In a subscription business, most lost revenue is not lost to competitors. It is lost to cards that expired, banks that declined a renewal at three in the morning, and retries nobody configured. Three habits recover most of it. Retry a failed renewal on a schedule rather than instantly. Ask for a new card before the current one expires rather than after. Keep a customer’s access alive for a short grace period instead of cutting it at the first decline.

Cutting disputes before they start

Put a recognisable name in the statement descriptor. Suppose the descriptor shows a legal entity nobody has heard of. The customer sees an unknown charge. They call the bank rather than you.
Email before the renewal, not after. A reminder a few days ahead costs nothing and removes the single most common dispute.
Make cancelling as easy as subscribing. A cancel flow hidden behind support tickets converts irritated customers into chargebacks at 100,00 EUR each.
Answer refund requests quickly. Fifty euros beats a hundred, and a refund does not count against the dispute ratio the way a chargeback does.

In short

SaaS, VPN and hosting are not difficult verticals — they are documented verticals. The rate depends on the type of business. The reserve holds part of the turnover for a fixed window. The application turns on whether your public pages say the same thing your checkout does. Keep the money in an account in the company’s name. That is described under business IBAN. Treat renewals as the part of the product they actually are.