BaaS pricing explained — what's published, what's negotiated

Why you can't google a BaaS price

Banking-as-a-Service pricing is sales-led by design, not by laziness. Each deal reprices risk (your licence model, your customer base, your compliance load) and volume (accounts, cards, transactions) — a published rate card would misprice most deals on both sides. That is also why “how much does BaaS cost?” produces content farms and no numbers: the honest answer is a structure, not a figure.

This guide gives you that structure — and, because transparency is this catalogue's founding principle, the complete table of prices that are published across the verified catalogue, so you can at least benchmark the transparent edge of the market.

The BaaS cost structure — nine lines that make up a quote

1. Setup / implementation fee — onboarding, due diligence, technical integration; usually one-off and negotiable against volume commitments.
2. Monthly platform fee or minimum — the floor you pay regardless of usage; the single most important number for an early-stage product.
3. Per-account fees — opening and monthly maintenance per end-customer account; often tiered by active vs dormant.
4. Per-card fees — issuance (physical vs virtual differ sharply) plus a monthly active-card fee; see the BIN sponsor cost guide for the card-programme layer.
5. Per-transaction fees — SEPA credit transfers, instant payments, direct debits and card authorisations are each priced separately; rails depth matters (see the IBAN-as-a-service guide).
6. FX margins — where multi-currency is in scope, the spread often outweighs the visible fees.
7. Scheme and interchange passthrough — Visa/Mastercard costs passed to you; ask for them itemised, not blended.
8. Compliance add-ons — KYC/KYB per check (one of the few genuinely published prices — see the table below), transaction-monitoring, sanctions screening.
9. Safeguarding / float terms — who earns interest on customer balances is a negotiation line worth real money in a positive-rate environment.

What moves the quote

• Licence model — operating under the provider's licence (umbrella) costs more per unit than BYOL, because the provider carries regulatory responsibility for your programme.
• Volumes and their credibility — a quote against “we expect a million users” is priced defensively; a quote against staged, evidenced volumes is not.
• Markets — each additional country adds passporting scope, local rails and sometimes local IBAN requirements.
• Contract shape — term length, minimums and exit clauses trade directly against unit prices.

Every published entry price in the verified catalogue

The transparent edge of the market: 24 of 540 verified providers publish an entry price — concentrated in gateways, spend management, KYC and account products, not core infrastructure. Each links to its verified profile:

Entry prices as published by each provider at the verification date - starting tiers, not your negotiated rate. Always verify at source; prices move.

How to get real numbers

Prepare five things: what you are building, target markets and IBAN countries, expected volumes, your licence status, and a launch timeline — then ask several providers against the same brief so the quotes are comparable. That is literally what our matching service does: a structured brief, three named source-verified providers, like-for-like responses. Free for buyers, zero pay-to-rank.

Related: how to choose a BaaS provider · verified BaaS providers · the digital sovereignty framework · score your stack.