Payment pricing pages are usually full of numbers that are technically accurate and still misleading, because the real cost of a payment platform rarely lives in the headline rate. It lives in the monthly minimum you pay whether you process anything or not, the spread quietly built into a conversion rate that never gets a line item of its own, and the custody fee charged for the privilege of a balance sitting somewhere you cannot fully see.
ChainPal’s pricing is built to not have any of those places to hide a cost.
The number itself
Checkout, payment links, invoices and in-person terminals are priced at a flat 0.8% per settled transaction. Not per transaction attempted, per transaction that actually settles. There is no monthly software seat fee and no monthly minimum, so a business processing a handful of payments a month and one processing thousands both pay exactly the rate the pricing page says, nothing more because volume was low, nothing less because a sales rep negotiated it down.
Why "no setup fee" is not just a discount
Framed as a discount, "no setup fee" sounds like a promotion. It is not one, it is a description of the architecture. A setup fee usually exists to cover the cost of provisioning a merchant account, underwriting risk, and standing up custody infrastructure to hold a business’s funds between settlement cycles. ChainPal never holds customer balances, so there is no custody infrastructure being provisioned for you, and nothing to charge a setup fee to amortize.
Where the 0.8% actually goes
The rate covers exactly what it sounds like it covers: settling the transaction, generating the single-use address it lands on, routing it straight through to the destination you named, and the infrastructure that comes with every account, from the dashboard to the API and signed webhooks, regardless of plan tier, because there is no separate tier gating access to the tools you would need to actually run the account.
What is priced separately, and why
Not every product on ChainPal is priced the same way, because not every product costs the same thing to run. Crypto payouts to an approved external wallet carry a 0% ChainPal fee, since routing to a wallet a business already controls does not carry the same settlement cost as a bank payout does. Bank payouts run at 0.8%, the same published rate as a client deposit. OTC is priced differently again, quoted per ticket rather than as a flat percentage, because ChainPal is acting as the counterparty on that side of the business, not charging a transaction fee for facilitating someone else’s trade.
Treating those as different products with different, clearly published rates, rather than folding everything into one blended number, is the same instinct behind not charging a setup fee in the first place: a price should describe what it is actually paying for.