Stripe, Mollie or Adyen: what taking a card really costs a European store

The number every guide quotes, 2.9% plus 30 cents, is a United States card rate. For a store based in Belgium or the Netherlands it is close to double what you will actually pay, and it describes a payment method a lot of your customers will not even use. Two things make European card acceptance a different calculation: European law caps the interchange baked into consumer-card fees, and a large share of Benelux checkouts run through Bancontact and iDEAL, which are flat-fee bank payments, not cards.

Why European card fees start near 1.5%, not 2.9%

Most of what a processor charges on a card is interchange, the slice that goes to the card-issuing bank. In the United States that slice is unregulated and often around 1.8%. In the European Economic Area the Interchange Fee Regulation caps it at 0.2% for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards. That one rule is why a European processor can price a standard EEA card at 1.5% plus 0.25 euro where a US processor needs 2.9%. If you have been sizing your fee budget off American numbers, you have been over-provisioning by roughly half. The cap applies to EEA consumer cards only, so commercial cards and cards issued outside Europe still cost more.

The standard 2026 rates, three European processors

These are the everyday published rates for a business based in the EEA, not negotiated volume deals:

• Stripe, standard EEA consumer card: 1.5% plus 0.25 euro. Premium EEA cards 1.9% plus 0.25 euro, UK cards 2.5% plus 0.25 euro. No monthly fee.
• Mollie, EEA consumer card: 1.80% plus 0.25 euro. Commercial cards 2.90% plus 0.25 euro. No monthly fee.
• Adyen: interchange plus plus. On its published pricing that is a 0.13 dollar fixed processing fee plus a 0.60% Adyen markup, both stacked on top of the raw interchange and card-scheme fees. No monthly fee, but a minimum monthly invoice. The 0.60% is the line most Adyen summaries drop, and it is what actually decides whether interchange plus plus beats a blended rate.
• Both Stripe and Mollie price a card issued outside Europe at 3.25% plus 0.25 euro, and Stripe adds a further 2% when a currency has to be converted.

Bancontact and iDEAL usually beat cards, and providers price them very differently

In Belgium, Bancontact is the default way people pay online; in the Netherlands it is iDEAL. Both are bank-transfer methods, not cards, and offering them is not really optional if you sell to Benelux consumers. The fee structure is where providers diverge sharply. Stripe prices Bancontact as a flat 0.35 euro per transaction with no percentage at all. Mollie prices the same method at 1.40% plus 0.25 euro. iDEAL is a low flat fee either way, with Mollie listing 0.32 euro.

The difference is not small once baskets grow. On a 20 euro Bancontact sale, Stripe costs 0.35 euro flat while Mollie costs about 0.28 euro plus 0.25, roughly 0.53 euro. On a 100 euro sale the gap widens: Stripe is still 0.35 euro, Mollie is 1.65 euro. A flat fee is cheaper on almost any basket above about 7 euro, so if a lot of your revenue comes through Bancontact, the way your provider prices that one method can matter more than its card rate does.

For subscriptions, SEPA Direct Debit undercuts every card

If you bill the same euro amount every month, a membership, a SaaS seat, a retainer, a card makes you pay a percentage on money you already knew was coming. SEPA Direct Debit does not. It pulls the payment straight from the customer bank account, and both Stripe and Mollie price it as a flat 0.35 euro per transaction with no percentage at all. A card fee scales with the amount; a direct-debit fee does not, which is exactly what you want on predictable recurring revenue.

The gap is the whole point once amounts grow. A 50 euro monthly subscription on a standard EEA card at Stripe costs 1 euro to collect (1.5% is 0.75, plus 0.25); on SEPA Direct Debit it costs 0.35 euro. At 200 euro a month the card costs 3.25 euro and direct debit still costs 0.35 euro. Over a year that one subscriber is about 39 euro of card fees against 4.20 euro of direct-debit fees, and the saving multiplies by every subscriber you have.

Three things keep it from being a free win. It is a euro bank-account method inside the SEPA zone, so it does not cover one-off buyers or customers paying by card from abroad, and you have to collect a mandate first, usually on the customer first payment. It settles in a few business days rather than instantly. And a debit can bounce: insufficient funds or a closed account trigger a failed-payment fee (3.50 euro at Stripe), and under SEPA rules a customer can reclaim an authorised collection within eight weeks with no reason given, or up to thirteen months if it was never authorised, so treat it as a method that can be pulled back like a chargeback (Stripe books a 15 euro dispute fee). For steady, consenting subscribers those are rare events; for a low-trust or high-churn base they can eat the saving. Used for what it is good at, recurring euro billing to people who chose to pay you, it is the cheapest line on this whole page.

Which of the three fits

• Stripe: the smoothest developer experience, transparent flat rates, no monthly fee, and the cheapest published Bancontact handling. The default for most online stores that want to integrate quickly.
• Mollie: built in the Benelux and strong on local methods and dashboards, with simple blended pricing and no monthly fee. Its card and Bancontact rates are a little higher than Stripe on paper, so the choice comes down to which methods your customers actually use.
• Adyen: interchange plus plus gives full visibility into every fee, which pays off at high volume where a fraction of a percent is real money, but the minimum monthly invoice and heavier setup make it an enterprise tool, not a small-store choice.

What interchange plus plus actually adds up to

Adyen is easy to misread as almost free, because the number it advertises is just the 0.13 dollar fixed processing fee. That is not the whole cost. Interchange plus plus means you pay four things stacked together: the raw interchange (capped at 0.2% for an EEA consumer debit card and 0.3% for an EEA consumer credit card, the same regulation that holds the blended rates down), the card-scheme fee the network charges (roughly 0.1% on a typical consumer card), Adyen own 0.60% markup, and the 0.13 dollar per transaction. The 0.60% is Adyen actual margin, and it is the line most comparisons leave off.

Add those up on a standard EEA consumer credit card and the all-in is roughly 0.3% interchange plus about 0.1% scheme fees plus 0.60% Adyen plus 0.13 dollar, near 1.0% plus 0.13 dollar per transaction. Against Stripe or Mollie blended (1.5% plus 0.25 euro and 1.80% plus 0.25 euro), that can genuinely come out lower, which is the real reason interchange plus plus wins at scale: on high volume through cheap capped EEA consumer cards, a percent saved is a large number. The catch is the other direction. On a premium, commercial or non-EEA card the interchange is not capped, so the same 0.60% and 0.13 dollar ride on top of a much higher base, and the transparent model can cost more than a blended one that averaged that expensive card in. Interchange plus plus rewards a clean, mostly-EEA-consumer card mix and punishes a messy one.

Then there is the floor. Adyen has no monthly fee, but it states it does have "a minimum invoice depending on industry or business model" and does not publish the amount, pointing you to sales; third-party pricing guides commonly report it at around 1,000 euro a month. Below the volume where your real processing fees clear that minimum, you are paying for capacity you do not use, so the fixed floor, not the per-transaction math, is usually what rules Adyen out for a small or mid-size store. Price your own card mix and monthly volume against that minimum before assuming the transparent model is cheaper; the calculator works your blended per-sale cost so you have a number to compare it to. (Adyen publishes these fees in dollars and the figures are list prices that move, so confirm your own quote.)

What the published rates leave out

The shelf price assumes an EEA consumer card, no refund and no dispute. Three lines sit outside it, and each one only pushes your real rate up:

• Non-European and commercial cards are not interchange-capped. A card issued outside the EEA costs 3.25% plus 0.25 euro at both Stripe and Mollie, a business or corporate card costs more than a consumer one, and currency conversion adds a further fee on top.
• Refunds do not return the fee. When you refund an order the customer gets the full amount back, but the processor keeps what it already charged, so a returned sale still costs you the fee.
• Chargebacks cost more than the sale. A disputed card payment pulls back the order total plus a flat dispute fee, and you have usually already shipped the goods.

The line that sits on no rate card: when the processor holds your money

Every rate above prices what it costs to take a payment. None of them touch a separate risk that can hurt more than any fee: the processor holding your own money before it reaches your bank. A reserve or a deposit is not a fee, so it appears on no pricing page and no calculator can price it in advance, but it is real cash locked out of your account, and all three of these providers can apply it to a merchant they read as higher risk.

• Stripe can place an account on a reserve. It does not publish a rate and sets the terms per account when its risk systems flag elevated exposure, such as a rising dispute rate, a sudden jump in volume, a higher-risk category or incomplete verification. A rolling reserve holds back a percentage of incoming payments and releases each daily slice on a delay; the figure commonly quoted for one is roughly 5 to 15 percent held for about 90 to 180 days, though Stripe agrees the exact terms with the account rather than posting them.
• Mollie says the same in its user agreement: it may hold a percentage of each transaction, or a set amount, on a rolling basis to cover chargebacks, refunds and similar liabilities, with the details depending on the risk level of the business. If a Mollie account closes with funds still held, you can request them back within five years.
• Adyen builds it into how balances work. It calculates a required deposit daily from your processing volume and your chargeback and refund numbers, and when your estimated exposure runs more than 10,000 euro above your coverage it automatically withholds the difference from your next payout; you can also configure a separate reserve threshold. If you stop processing, the deposit is returned gradually once Adyen has no more chargeback exposure, roughly six months after your last payment.

The shape is the same across all three: reserves are risk-based, unpublished, and applied to the account rather than charged per transaction, which is exactly why they never show up in a fee comparison. What keeps them off your books is dull and mostly within your control. Verify the business fully at signup, keep your dispute rate low (a chargeback rate above about 1 percent is the classic trigger), tell the processor before a genuine volume spike rather than after, and for anything a processor might read as higher risk, keep a second processor live so a hold on one account does not freeze your whole cash flow at once.

The European step with no US equivalent: strong customer authentication

One line that never appears on a US pricing page shapes European card acceptance: strong customer authentication, or SCA. Under the EU PSD2 rules, most online card payments where both the shopper bank and your processor sit in the EEA have to be authenticated with a second factor, delivered through 3-D Secure 2, the Visa Secure or Mastercard Identity Check step your customer sees. It is not a fee, so it never appears in the rate comparison, but it costs you in two quieter ways: at the checkout and on your fraud liability.

The checkout cost is abandonment. Every extra authentication step, a bank-app prompt, a one-time code, a fingerprint, is a place a buyer can drop out, especially on mobile or when the bank app is slow. Stripe and Mollie both run 3-D Secure automatically and try to keep genuine payments in the frictionless flow, but the step is real and some sales are lost to it.

The liability cost runs the other way, and it is the part worth understanding. When a payment is authenticated through 3-D Secure, responsibility for a later fraud chargeback shifts from you to the card issuer: if the charge turns out to be fraud, the bank that approved the authentication carries it, not you. Skip the authentication and you keep that liability yourself. So the friction you would most like to remove is also what moves fraud losses off your books.

PSD2 lets low-risk payments skip the step through named exemptions, and this is where the trade-off bites. A transaction under 30 euro can go through unauthenticated, though the bank must ask for authentication once a card has used that low-value exemption five times or 100 euro of exempted payments have stacked up. A processor with a low enough fraud rate can apply a transaction-risk-analysis exemption on larger amounts, up to 500 euro for the cleanest fraud records. And a fixed recurring charge only needs authentication on the first payment, so the merchant-initiated charges after it are out of scope, which is why a card subscription set up once keeps billing without a prompt. The catch: using an exemption to smooth the checkout also gives up the liability shift, so an exempted payment that turns out to be fraud is back on you, and the issuing bank always has the last word and can demand authentication even on a payment that qualifies for an exemption.

For everyday selling this runs in the background: Stripe and Mollie decide per payment whether to authenticate or claim an exemption. But it explains a pattern that catches European sellers out. The smoothest checkout is not always the cheapest once a fraud chargeback lands, because the step you removed was also the one that would have made the loss the bank problem rather than yours.

The other option: let someone else be the seller and owe the tax

Stripe, Mollie and Adyen are payment gateways. The money runs through them, but you stay the merchant of record: you are the legal seller, so charging the right VAT rate, registering for the One Stop Shop and filing the returns is your job, exactly as the VAT section above describes. A merchant of record (MoR) provider flips that around. Paddle and Lemon Squeezy become the legal seller of your product, so they charge and remit VAT and sales tax worldwide, and you never touch an OSS return or a foreign tax registration.

Handing that off has a clear price. Both Paddle and Lemon Squeezy publish a single blended rate of about 5% plus roughly 0.50 dollar per transaction, which already bundles card processing, tax compliance and fraud handling into one line. That is over three times the percentage a European card gateway charges for a standard EEA card (1.5% plus 0.25 euro at Stripe), and Lemon Squeezy adds further surcharges on top, about 1.5% for an international card, another 1.5% for PayPal, and 0.5% on subscriptions. So you pay a visible premium on every sale in exchange for never registering, charging or filing VAT anywhere yourself.

Whether that trade is worth it turns on how much cross-border tax work you would otherwise carry. For a Belgian store selling mostly to local card and Bancontact buyers, a gateway plus one quarterly OSS return is far cheaper, and the MoR premium is not worth paying. For a one-person digital-product or SaaS business selling into dozens of countries, where the alternative is tracking tax rules, rates and registration thresholds in each market, the flat MoR fee can be the cheaper choice once you price your own time and the risk of filing something wrong. The heavier and more scattered your tax exposure, the more that premium buys back.

So there is no single cheapest European processor. It turns on your average basket size, how much of your revenue comes through Bancontact or iDEAL rather than cards, how many of your buyers sit outside the EEA, and whether you would rather pay a premium to hand off the tax work entirely. Put your own numbers and payment-method mix into the calculator and it will show your real per-sale cost rather than the rate on the pricing page. If handing off the tax work is the route you are weighing, the sibling guide comparing the merchant-of-record providers lines up Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar and Stripe Managed Payments on price.