GoCardless

Name: GoCardless
Brand: GoCardless
Price: 1204 USD

Pull money from bank accounts instead of cards, at roughly a quarter of the cost

GoCardless is a bank payment company that lets businesses collect recurring payments directly from customers' bank accounts by direct debit rather than by card: customers authorise a mandate once, GoCardless pulls each payment on schedule across Bacs, SEPA, ACH, PAD, BECS, and other local schemes, retries failures automatically, and settles the money to you, charging from 1 percent plus 20 pence capped at 4 pounds on the self-serve Standard plan, with no monthly fee, no card expiry churn, and an explicit position as your payment provider rather than your merchant of record.

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Overview

GoCardless exists because cards are a bad instrument for recurring payments. A card expires, gets reissued, gets cancelled after a fraud alert, and costs 2.9 percent plus a fixed fee every time it is charged. A direct debit mandate does none of those things: it is an instruction sitting against a bank account that stays valid until the customer revokes it, and pulling money along it costs a fraction of a card transaction. That single observation, applied to the fragmented mess of national direct debit schemes across Europe, North America, and Australasia, is the entire company.

Founded in London in 2011 by Hiroki Takeuchi, Matt Robinson, and Tom Blomfield, who later founded Monzo, GoCardless raised roughly $540M and reached a $2.1B valuation in 2022 before the market turned. It cut around a fifth of its workforce, refocused hard on profitability, acquired Nuapay from EML Payments in 2024 to add payout capability alongside collection, and reported its first profitable quarter in the 2025 financial year. In December 2025 Mollie agreed to acquire GoCardless for around 1.05 billion euros in a mostly stock transaction expected to close by mid 2026, creating a combined European payments group serving more than 350,000 businesses.

The pricing is the most legible reason to look at it. Standard is 1 percent plus 20 pence per transaction, capped at 4 pounds, with no monthly fee and self-serve signup. Advanced is 1.25 percent plus 20 pence capped at 5 pounds and adds intelligent retries and custom payment pages. Pro is 1.4 percent plus 20 pence capped at 5.60 pounds and adds success intelligence and priority support. International transactions cost roughly one point more on each tier. Above about 1 million pounds a year you can negotiate.

The catch is what direct debit is not. It is slow, taking days rather than seconds to confirm. It is not a payment method your customer can use impulsively, because setting up a mandate is heavier than typing a card number. Coverage is scheme by scheme, so a global consumer product will still need cards for a large share of buyers. And GoCardless is emphatically not a merchant of record: you are the seller, you own the tax liability, and you own the chargeback equivalent, which in direct debit is an indemnity claim the payer can raise for a long window after the fact.

Best for

Subscription businesses in the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and increasingly North America with predictable recurring charges and average tickets high enough that a card's percentage genuinely hurts, particularly business-to-business SaaS, membership organisations, gyms, professional services, utilities, and anyone whose involuntary churn is dominated by expired and reissued cards.

Not the right fit for

Consumer impulse purchases and anything with a self-serve checkout that has to convert in thirty seconds; setting up a direct debit mandate is heavier than typing a card number and will cost you conversion.
Businesses needing instant confirmation of payment, because direct debit settles over days and a failure can surface after you have already delivered the service, which is a fundamentally different risk profile from a card authorisation.
Anyone wanting a merchant of record: GoCardless is your payment provider, not your seller, so VAT, sales tax, invoicing, and the customer contract remain entirely your obligations and there is no tax automation in the product at all.
Companies whose customers are globally scattered across countries without a supported direct debit scheme, since coverage is scheme by scheme and you will still need a card processor alongside for a large share of revenue.
Teams looking for a complete billing platform: GoCardless collects money and manages mandates, but plan catalogues, proration, entitlements, quotes, revenue recognition, and dunning strategy all live in whatever billing system you put in front of it.

How it works

1
You sign up on the Standard plan without a sales call, verify your business, and connect a settlement bank account. GoCardless conducts underwriting because direct debit schemes hold the collecting business accountable for improper collections, so this review is more substantive than opening a card processing account.
2
Each customer authorises a mandate. That happens through a GoCardless-hosted page, a custom payment page on the higher plans, an embedded flow via the API, or an Instant Bank Pay authorisation using open banking, where the customer confirms through their own banking app. The mandate is stored against the customer and stays valid indefinitely.
3
You create a subscription or a one-off payment against that mandate, either through the dashboard, through a partner platform like Xero or Chargebee, or through the API. GoCardless notifies the customer in advance as scheme rules require, then submits the collection to the appropriate scheme: Bacs in the United Kingdom, SEPA Direct Debit in the eurozone, ACH in the United States, PAD in Canada, BECS in Australia, and several others.
4
Payments settle on a scheme-dependent timetable, typically several business days rather than the two days a card payout takes. Failures are reported back with a reason code and, on Advanced and Pro, are automatically retried on a schedule GoCardless derives from its own success data rather than on a fixed interval.
5
Money arrives in your bank account net of the percentage and the fixed fee, capped per transaction. Because you are the merchant, tax collection, invoicing, and the customer contract are entirely yours, and GoCardless never appears on the customer's side of the relationship except as the name on the bank statement narrative.

Feature breakdown

21 features in 4 modules

Bank debit collection

The core capability, and the reason the take rate is a fifth of a card's.

Multi-scheme direct debit: Bacs in the United Kingdom, SEPA Direct Debit across the eurozone, ACH in the United States, PAD in Canada, BECS and BECS NZ in Australasia, Autogiro in Sweden and Betalingsservice in Denmark, all through one API and one dashboard.
Mandate management: A mandate is created once and reused indefinitely, with GoCardless handling scheme-specific mandate rules, advance notice requirements, and revocation, so you never build scheme logic yourself.
No card expiry churn: Bank accounts do not expire or get reissued the way cards do, which removes the single largest cause of involuntary churn in card-based subscription businesses.
Subscriptions and one-off collections: Recurring schedules at arbitrary intervals plus ad hoc collections against an existing mandate, so a monthly retainer and a variable overage bill run off the same authorisation.
Variable amounts: The amount collected can differ each cycle within scheme notice rules, which is what makes usage-based and metered billing possible on direct debit at all.
Per-transaction fee cap: Fees are capped at 4 pounds on Standard, 5 pounds on Advanced, and 5.60 pounds on Pro, so a 2,000 pound invoice costs the same as a 500 pound one. On large tickets this is dramatically cheaper than any percentage-based card rate.

Open banking and instant payments

The Instant Bank Pay layer that answers direct debit's speed problem.

Instant Bank Pay: An open banking payment where the customer authorises through their own banking app and the money moves immediately, used for first payments, one-off charges, and recovering a failed collection without waiting for a retry cycle.
Verified mandate setup: Open banking authentication confirms the payer genuinely controls the account at mandate setup, which reduces both fraud and the failure rate of the first collection.
Payouts via Nuapay: The 2024 Nuapay acquisition added the ability to send money as well as collect it, so refunds, commissions, and supplier payments can run on the same rails.
Bank account verification: Account details are validated at capture time so a mistyped sort code is caught before it becomes a failed collection days later.

Success and recovery

Where the paid tiers earn their extra quarter point.

Intelligent retries: Failed collections are automatically resubmitted on a schedule derived from GoCardless's own data on when a given failure reason tends to clear, available on Advanced and Pro rather than Standard.
Success Intelligence: Pro-tier analytics on failure reasons, recovery rates, and payment success across your customer base, which turns involuntary churn from a mystery into a metric.
Failure reason codes: Scheme-level reason codes are surfaced through the API and dashboard so your system can distinguish insufficient funds from a revoked mandate and respond differently.
Automatic advance notice: Scheme-mandated advance notification to the payer is generated and sent by GoCardless, keeping you compliant with Bacs and SEPA notice rules without building a notification system.
Protect Plus fraud tooling: An add-on layer providing fraud screening and mandate-level risk signals for businesses exposed to fraudulent mandate setup.

Integrations and platform

GoCardless is usually the collection rail underneath something else.

Accounting and invoicing connectors: Native integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and FreeAgent so invoices raised in your accounting system are collected automatically when due.
Billing platform partnerships: Available as a payment gateway inside Chargebee, Recurly, Zuora, and other subscription platforms, so you keep your billing engine and swap the rail underneath it.
Ecommerce and forms: Connectors for Shopify, WooCommerce, Zapier, and a long tail of vertical software where recurring collection is the point.
REST API and webhooks: A clean, well-documented API covering customers, bank accounts, mandates, subscriptions, payments, refunds, and events, with signed webhooks for every state transition.
Partner and platform model: Software platforms can onboard their own merchants onto GoCardless and take a cut, which is why so many vertical SaaS products offer direct debit without building it.
Multi-currency collection: Collect in pounds, euros, dollars, Australian and Canadian dollars, Swedish kronor, Danish kroner, and New Zealand dollars, with settlement into a matching or converted account.

Use cases

4 documented

United Kingdom business-to-business SaaS billing annually

Sixty customers on 3,000 pound annual contracts. Card processing on that book costs roughly 5,200 pounds a year in fees and produces an expired-card failure every few weeks.

Direct debit at 1 percent plus 20 pence capped at 4 pounds costs 240 pounds a year in total, because every transaction hits the cap. The mandate does not expire, so involuntary churn effectively disappears.

Membership organisation collecting monthly subscriptions

Four thousand members paying 12 pounds a month, where card reissues cause a steady trickle of lapsed memberships and a large volume of chasing emails.

Mandates survive card reissues entirely, intelligent retries on Advanced recover the insufficient-funds failures automatically, and the cost per collection falls to about 32 pence.

Professional services firm invoicing through Xero

Monthly retainers invoiced in Xero and chased by email, with payment arriving whenever the client's finance team gets around to it.

The Xero integration collects each invoice on its due date automatically, which converts an accounts-receivable problem into a scheduled event and removes the chasing entirely.

European SaaS company using Chargebee

Wants to keep its billing engine, plan catalogue, and revenue reporting, but is paying card rates on large annual invoices to European business customers.

GoCardless is added as a payment gateway inside Chargebee for SEPA Direct Debit collections, so nothing about the billing system changes and the take rate on the largest invoices collapses.

Pricing

from 1 percent plus 20 pence per transaction, capped at 4 pounds

Per-transaction percentage plus a small fixed fee, capped per transaction, across three self-serve tiers with no monthly platform fee. Custom pricing is negotiable above roughly 1 million pounds of annual revenue.

Plan	Price	Includes
Standard	1% + 20p per transaction, capped at £4	Self-serve signup with no sales call Direct debit collection across supported schemes Hosted payment pages and mandate management Subscriptions, one-off payments, and the full API International transactions at 2 percent plus 20 pence No automatic retries on this tier, which is the main functional gap against Advanced.
Advanced	1.25% + 20p per transaction, capped at £5	Everything in Standard Intelligent automatic retries on failed collections Custom-branded payment pages Enhanced reporting International transactions at 2.25 percent plus 20 pence The extra quarter point is usually paid for several times over by the retries if you have any meaningful failure rate.
Pro	1.4% + 20p per transaction, capped at £5.60	Everything in Advanced Success Intelligence analytics on failures and recovery Priority support Advanced integration support International transactions at 2.4 percent plus 20 pence
Custom	Negotiated annual agreement	Available above roughly £1M in annual revenue Volume-based discounts Bespoke terms and support arrangements Requires contacting sales

Add-ons

Instant Bank Pay (Quoted per transaction): Open banking instant payments, priced separately from direct debit collection.
Protect Plus (Quoted): Fraud and risk tooling for businesses exposed to fraudulent mandate setup.
Failed payment fee (Charged per failure): Failed collections attract a fee on most schemes; model this if your failure rate is above a couple of percent.
Currency conversion (Applied on cross-currency settlement): Collecting in one currency and settling in another carries a conversion cost.

Billing notes

Pricing is published in pounds sterling and the caps are stated in pounds, so businesses operating in euros or dollars should convert carefully rather than assuming parity.
The per-transaction cap is the headline feature for high-value invoices: a 5,000 pound collection costs 4 pounds on Standard, which is a rounding error against a card rate.
Failed collections attract a fee, so a business with a high failure rate can find its effective cost materially above the headline percentage.
International transactions cost roughly a full point more than domestic on every tier, which matters if your customer base straddles schemes.
There is no monthly platform fee on any self-serve tier, so the cost of trying GoCardless alongside your existing card processor is limited to the transactions you route through it.
GoCardless is not a merchant of record. VAT, sales tax, invoicing, and the customer contract are entirely yours, and nothing in the product touches tax compliance.

Value assessment: Work it at a $50 average ticket, roughly 40 pounds. On Standard you pay 1 percent, about 40 pence, plus 20 pence, so 60 pence per transaction, or about 76 cents. At $10,000 a month across 200 transactions that is roughly $152, an effective rate of 1.52 percent. At $100,000 a month across 2,000 transactions it is roughly $1,520, again 1.52 percent, because the cap does not bite at this ticket size. Set that against Stripe Billing at 4.2 percent, Paddle at 6 percent, and Gumroad at 11 percent on the identical ticket. GoCardless is between three and seven times cheaper than everything else in this category, and on large invoices the fee cap makes the gap absurd: a 4,000 pound annual contract costs 4 pounds to collect against roughly 120 pounds on a card. The reason everyone has not moved is that direct debit is slower, harder to sign up for, geographically constrained, and does not touch tax compliance at all. You are not buying a billing platform. You are buying a much cheaper rail for the payments that suit it, and the right answer for most businesses is to run it alongside cards rather than instead of them.

Strengths & limitations

Strengths

Effective cost around 1.5 percent on a typical ticket and dramatically lower on large invoices because of the per-transaction fee cap, which is a fraction of any card-based alternative.
Mandates do not expire, so the single largest source of involuntary subscription churn simply does not exist on this rail.
One API and one dashboard across Bacs, SEPA, ACH, PAD, BECS, Autogiro, and Betalingsservice, which is a genuinely hard integration problem solved for you.
Self-serve signup with published pricing on all three standard tiers and no monthly fee, so testing it costs nothing but the transactions you route through it.
Deep partner ecosystem: it works as a gateway inside Chargebee, Recurly, and Zuora and as a native collection layer in Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage, so you rarely have to replace your billing system to adopt it.
Instant Bank Pay via open banking answers the classic direct debit speed objection for first payments and failure recovery.
The company reached its first profitable quarter in the 2025 financial year and is being acquired by Mollie, which points to consolidation into a larger and better capitalised European payments group rather than to distress.

Limitations

Not a merchant of record and not remotely a tax product: VAT, sales tax, invoicing, and the customer contract are entirely yours, which puts it in a different category from Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, or Gumroad.
Not a billing platform either. There is no plan catalogue worth the name, no proration engine, no entitlements, no quotes, and no revenue recognition, so you need a billing layer in front of it.
Settlement is slow. Collections take business days to confirm, and a failure can arrive after you have already delivered the service, which is a materially different risk shape from a card authorisation.
Mandate setup is heavier than entering a card and will reduce conversion in any self-serve consumer funnel.
Coverage is scheme by scheme. A globally distributed customer base will still need a card processor for a large share of revenue, so this is usually a second rail rather than a replacement.
Automatic retries are gated to the Advanced tier and above, which means the cheapest plan is missing the feature that most directly affects revenue.
Direct debit indemnity claims give payers a long window to reverse a collection, and that liability sits with you.
The Mollie acquisition, agreed in December 2025 and expected to close by mid 2026, creates genuine roadmap and product-integration uncertainty over the next couple of years.

Head-to-head comparisons

5 alternatives

GoCardless vs Mollie

from €0.32 per iDEAL transaction, or 1.80 percent plus €0.25 on European Economic Area consumer cards

Soon to be the same company: Mollie agreed to acquire GoCardless for around 1.05 billion euros in December 2025, with closing expected by mid 2026 and a phased product integration. Today they are complementary rather than competing. Mollie is a card and local-method processor with iDEAL, Bancontact, and a subscriptions API at roughly 2.3 percent on a European consumer card. GoCardless is a bank debit specialist at roughly 1.5 percent with a per-transaction cap. If you need both cards and direct debit in Europe, you are increasingly buying from one vendor either way.

Full GoCardless vs Mollie comparison

GoCardless vs Chargebee

from $0 per month plus 0.80% of monthly billing value on Flow pay-as-you-go

Not competitors, they compose. Chargebee provides the subscription catalogue, proration, revenue recognition, and dunning strategy; GoCardless plugs in as a payment gateway to collect by direct debit. If you are already on Chargebee and paying card rates on large annual European invoices, adding GoCardless underneath is one of the highest-return changes available and requires no migration of billing logic at all.

Full GoCardless vs Chargebee comparison

GoCardless vs Recurly

from $249 per month plus 0.9% of billing volume, with the first $40,000 of monthly billings included

Same relationship as Chargebee. Recurly owns the subscription lifecycle and its recovery engine; GoCardless is a gateway option underneath it for SEPA and Bacs collection. Choosing between them is a category error. The real decision is whether your billing engine supports direct debit properly, and Recurly does.

Full GoCardless vs Recurly comparison

GoCardless vs Zoho Billing

from $39 per organization per month billed annually (Standard), or $79 for Premium which includes subscription billing

Zoho Billing at $39 to $79 a month gives you the invoicing, subscription catalogue, and dunning that GoCardless deliberately lacks, and GoCardless gives Zoho a collection rail an order of magnitude cheaper than cards. For a United Kingdom or European small business invoicing business customers, the pairing is close to optimal: a flat software fee plus a capped 1 percent collection cost, with no percentage of revenue going to a billing vendor at all.

Full GoCardless vs Zoho Billing comparison

GoCardless vs MoonClerk

from $18 per month for up to $2,000 in monthly volume

Both are lightweight ways to start collecting recurring payments without building anything, but on different rails and continents. MoonClerk is a form-based front end over Stripe, so it is United States centric, card-first, and costs roughly 4.4 percent all in at $10,000 a month. GoCardless is bank debit, cheapest in the United Kingdom and Europe, at roughly 1.5 percent. If your customers are American and impulsive, MoonClerk. If they are British or European and on contracts, GoCardless.

Full GoCardless vs MoonClerk comparison

Implementation & onboarding

Setup time: A day for a no-code setup using hosted payment pages or an accounting integration. A week or two for a custom API integration, most of which is designing how your system reacts to failures that arrive days after submission rather than instantly.
Learning curve: Moderate, and the difficulty is conceptual rather than technical. Teams used to cards have to internalise that a payment is a request that resolves over days, that a failure can arrive after delivery, and that scheme rules impose advance notice obligations. The API itself is clean and well documented.
Onboarding: Self-serve on all three published tiers with no sales call, though underwriting is more substantive than opening a card account because direct debit schemes hold the collecting business accountable. Custom pricing above roughly 1 million pounds of annual revenue requires contacting sales.
Migration notes: Existing mandates can be transferred in from another provider on most schemes, notably Bacs, which is a meaningful advantage over card-based merchant of record platforms where credentials are not portable at all. Because GoCardless is a payment provider rather than a merchant of record, your customer relationships and contracts stay yours throughout. Moving out is likewise a mandate transfer rather than a re-authorisation campaign, though it is a scheme-level administrative process rather than a button.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web dashboardREST APIClient libraries for Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, .NET, and NodeHosted and embedded payment pagesPartner integrations in accounting and billing software
API: A clean REST API covering customers, bank accounts, mandates, subscriptions, payments, refunds, payouts, and events, with signed webhooks for every state transition and an idempotency model designed around the multi-day settlement cycle.
Compliance: PCI DSSFCA authorised as a payment institution in the United KingdomRegulated entities in the European UnionGDPRSOC 2Bacs, SEPA, ACH, PAD, and BECS scheme accreditations
Data residency: United Kingdom and European Union data centres for European operations, with regional infrastructure supporting other schemes.
SSO: Team accounts with role-based permissions and two-factor authentication; enterprise SSO on negotiated agreements.
Security notes: GoCardless holds direct scheme accreditations rather than reselling another provider's access, which is why it can operate across so many national schemes. Bank details are stored by GoCardless rather than by you, keeping sensitive account data out of your systems. Direct debit indemnity claims allow payers to reverse collections for an extended window and that liability sits with the collecting business.

Support & resources

Channels: Email supportIn-app supportPriority support on the Pro planNamed support on custom agreements
Documentation: developer.gocardless.com carries the API reference, scheme-specific guides, and integration recipes; a separate help centre covers dashboard operation, scheme rules, and failure reason codes.
Community: A substantial partner and developer ecosystem, plus detailed public documentation of scheme behaviour that is genuinely useful even to people not using the product.

Company

Founded: 2011
Headquarters: London, United Kingdom
Ownership: Venture-backed; being acquired by Mollie under an agreement signed in December 2025
Founders: Hiroki Takeuchi, Matt Robinson, Tom Blomfield
Employees: Approximately 835 (est. 2025)
Funding: Roughly $540M raised across nine rounds from investors including GV, Accel, Balderton, Salesforce Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and BlackRock, reaching a $2.1B valuation in 2022.

Funding history

Round	Amount	Year	Notes
Series F	$95M	2021	Led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from GV and Salesforce Ventures.
Series G	$312M	2022	Led by BlackRock at a $2.1B valuation, the company's peak private mark.
Acquisition	€1.05B	2025	Mollie agreed to acquire GoCardless in a mostly stock transaction announced in December 2025, expected to close by mid 2026.

Timeline

2011Founded in London by Hiroki Takeuchi, Matt Robinson, and Tom Blomfield to make Bacs direct debit accessible to small businesses.
2016Expands beyond Bacs into SEPA Direct Debit, beginning the multi-scheme strategy that defines the product.
2021Adds ACH in the United States and PAD in Canada, extending bank debit collection to North America.
2022Raises a $312M Series G led by BlackRock at a $2.1B valuation, then cuts roughly a fifth of its workforce as the market turns and refocuses on profitability.
2024Completes the acquisition of Sentenial and its Nuapay brand from EML Payments, adding the ability to send money as well as collect it.
2025Reports its first profitable quarter, and in December agrees to be acquired by Mollie for around 1.05 billion euros in a mostly stock deal.
2026The Mollie transaction is expected to close by mid year, with a phased integration of GoCardless products into the Mollie platform.

Integrations

Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and FreeAgent
Chargebee, Recurly, and Zuora as a payment gateway
Salesforce
Shopify and WooCommerce
Zapier
HubSpot
Netsuite via partners
A large catalogue of vertical software partners in fitness, education, property, and professional services
REST API and webhooks for custom integrations

Frequently asked questions

10 questions

What is GoCardless and how is it different from a card processor?

GoCardless collects recurring payments directly from customers' bank accounts by direct debit rather than by card. The customer authorises a mandate once and it stays valid indefinitely, so there is no card to expire or be reissued, and pulling money along the mandate costs about a fifth of what a card charge costs. The tradeoffs are that settlement takes days rather than seconds and mandate setup is heavier than typing a card number.

Is GoCardless a merchant of record?

No. GoCardless is your payment provider, not the seller. The contract of sale is between you and your customer, VAT and sales tax registration and remittance are entirely your obligation, and there is no tax automation anywhere in the product. If you want the tax liability to move to your vendor you need Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Creem, Dodo Payments, or Gumroad instead, and you will pay several times more for it.

What does GoCardless actually cost on a $50 ticket?

On the Standard plan, 1 percent plus 20 pence, so roughly 76 cents per transaction, giving an effective rate of about 1.52 percent. At $10,000 a month across 200 transactions that is roughly $152, and at $100,000 a month across 2,000 transactions roughly $1,520, the same ratio. Compare that with Stripe Billing at 4.2 percent, Paddle at 6 percent, and Gumroad at 11 percent on the same ticket.

How does the fee cap work and when does it matter?

Fees are capped at 4 pounds per transaction on Standard, 5 pounds on Advanced, and 5.60 pounds on Pro. On a typical $50 subscription the cap never bites. On a 4,000 pound annual contract it is transformative: the collection costs 4 pounds rather than the roughly 120 pounds a card would charge. If you invoice business customers annually, the cap alone can justify the integration.

Does GoCardless handle failed payments and dunning?

Partly, and it depends on your plan. Automatic intelligent retries, scheduled from GoCardless's own data on when a given failure reason tends to clear, are available on Advanced and Pro but not on Standard. Pro adds Success Intelligence analytics on failures and recovery. What GoCardless does not provide is a dunning email strategy, a customer-facing recovery flow, or churn analytics, because those belong to whatever billing platform sits in front of it.

Which countries and payment schemes does GoCardless support?

Bacs in the United Kingdom, SEPA Direct Debit across the eurozone, ACH in the United States, PAD in Canada, BECS in Australia and BECS NZ in New Zealand, Autogiro in Sweden, and Betalingsservice in Denmark, among others, all through one API. Coverage is scheme by scheme, so customers in countries without a supported scheme still need a card, and most businesses run GoCardless alongside a card processor rather than instead of one.

Can I use GoCardless with my existing billing system?

Usually yes, and that is the most common way it is adopted. GoCardless is available as a payment gateway inside Chargebee, Recurly, and Zuora, and as a native collection layer in Xero, QuickBooks, Sage, and FreeAgent. You keep your plan catalogue, proration, and reporting exactly as they are and change only the rail the money travels on, which makes it an unusually low-risk cost reduction.

How long do payments take to settle?

Days rather than seconds, and the exact timetable depends on the scheme. This is the fundamental tradeoff of direct debit: you find out a payment failed after you have often already delivered the service, which is a different risk shape from a card authorisation that either approves or declines immediately. Instant Bank Pay, GoCardless's open banking product, exists specifically to cover first payments and failure recovery where you need the money confirmed now.

What happens to my mandates if I leave GoCardless?

On most schemes, notably Bacs, mandates can be transferred to another provider rather than being re-collected from every customer. That is a genuine structural advantage over card-based merchant of record platforms, where the payment credentials belong to the vendor and every subscriber has to re-enter a card. Expect a scheme-level administrative process rather than a button, but the recurring revenue does survive the move.

What does the Mollie acquisition mean for GoCardless customers?

Mollie agreed in December 2025 to acquire GoCardless for around 1.05 billion euros in a mostly stock transaction, with closing expected by mid 2026 and a phased integration of GoCardless products into the Mollie platform. The stated rationale is combining Mollie's card and local payment method coverage with GoCardless's bank debit expertise across more than 350,000 businesses, not cost cutting. For customers the practical implication is roadmap uncertainty over the next couple of years, offset by joining a larger and better capitalised European payments group.

Editorial verdict

GoCardless is the cheapest rail in this category by a wide margin and the one most businesses under-use. At roughly 1.5 percent on a typical ticket, with a per-transaction cap that makes large annual invoices cost almost nothing to collect, and mandates that never expire the way cards do, the economics against any card-based option are not close. The honest framing is that it is not a billing platform and not a merchant of record, so it does not compete with Paddle or Chargebee, it sits underneath them. The right move for most United Kingdom and European subscription businesses is not to replace their card processor but to route the customers who will accept direct debit, particularly business customers on annual contracts, onto GoCardless and watch the blended take rate fall by two or three points. Weigh the multi-day settlement, the heavier mandate signup, and the roadmap uncertainty from the pending Mollie acquisition, then do it anyway.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.