Only two of the four publish a rate. Epoch lists 13.25% to 15.00% by weekly volume; Verotel lists 15.5% on Basic and 13.0% to 14.0% on Premium. CCBill and Segpay publish no percentage rate at all β Segpay has no pricing page. All four are payment facilitators, so you are a sub-merchant, not the merchant of record.
This comparison uses only what each company publishes on its own website, plus the card network rules that constrain all of them. Where a figure is not published, that is stated rather than estimated, because what a processor declines to disclose before you sign is itself a useful signal. All pages were checked in September 2026; rates change, so verify before committing.
Key Takeaways
- Epoch and Verotel publish full rate cards. CCBill and Segpay publish none β you cannot price a deal with either without applying.
- The published adult rates run 13% to 15.5%, and the card network rules β not processor greed β are what set that floor.
- Visa classifies adult merchants under MCC 5967 (Adult Content and Services) and requires compliance with its Integrity Risk Program β a document Visa does not publish.
- 3-D Secure does not protect US adult merchants from fraud disputes. Visa’s rules exclude MCC 5967 from Dispute Condition 10.4 protection. This is the least-known and most expensive fact here.
- Reserves differ sharply: Verotel publishes a 10% six-month rolling reserve; Epoch states it withholds none. CCBill and Segpay publish neither.
- Segpay publishes the most detailed compliance manual; Epoch’s site does not mention adult content at all. Transparency on price and transparency on rules are close to inverted across these four.
What These Four Companies Actually Are
All four describe themselves as payment facilitators, which has a specific meaning worth understanding before comparing prices.
A payment facilitator holds the merchant account and onboards you as a sub-merchant underneath it. Segpay puts it plainly: “A PayFac, like Segpay, is considered a master merchant.” CCBill describes its PSP product as “an account under CCBill’s master merchant account, payment gateway, and merchant services”. Epoch calls itself “a full service Payment Facilitator”. Verotel describes itself as “a leading Internet Payment Service Provider (IPSP)” and a “registered member service provider and Payment Facilitator for Visa, MasterCard, JCB, Discover and Diners Club”.
The practical consequence: onboarding is fast because you are joining an existing account, but the relationship with the card networks is theirs, not yours. If the facilitator’s risk team decides your content is a problem, you do not have an independent merchant account to fall back on.
Segpay is the exception that matters. Alongside the PayFac product it states it “has relationships with nine acquiring banks that span the US, EU, and UK and can underwrite direct merchant accounts for those merchants that prefer to manage their business on existing gateway technology”. If you want your own merchant account rather than a sub-merchant slot, that is a structurally different offer from the other three.
The Rates Each One Publishes
Epoch publishes a ten-tier rate card keyed to average weekly volume, running from 15.00% at $0β$5,000 down to 13.25% at $35,001β$45,000, with “$45,001 and above” listed as contact us.
Verotel publishes two products. Verotel Basic is a flat “15.5% of each transaction” with a EUR 500.00 annual Visa/MC registration and compliance monitoring fee, waived if “your transaction volume is at least EUR 100 per week”. Verotel Premium is tiered on weekly EUR volume from 14.0% at EUR 1β1,000 down to 13.0% above EUR 40,000.
CCBill publishes no percentage. Its pricing page says only that “Different pricing models are available for PSP and ISO offerings” and that models are “carefully crafted to meet the needs of different company sizes, risk levels, transaction volumes, business verticals, and operating regions”.
Segpay publishes no rate and has no pricing page; the URL returns the company’s own “Page not found”. The only per-transaction figures on its site are gateway fees: “Segpay authorization payments incur a $0.10 (USD) fee and declinesβor refundsβincur a $0.05 (USD) fee.”
| Processor | Published discount rate | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch | 15.00% β 13.25% | Average weekly volume, 10 tiers |
| Verotel Basic | 15.5% flat | All transactions |
| Verotel Premium | 14.0% β 13.0% | Weekly EUR volume |
| CCBill | Not published | Quoted on application |
| Segpay | Not published | No pricing page exists |
Treat published rates as a ceiling to negotiate from rather than a final price, and treat the absence of a rate as a reason to get the full fee schedule in writing before signing.
The Fees That Matter More Than the Rate
For most adult businesses the headline percentage is not what determines the cost of the account. Registration fees, chargeback pricing and reserves do.
| CCBill | Segpay | Epoch | Verotel | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Card registration | Visa $950; Mastercard $500 or $1000 by region | Not published | $1,950 initial and annual renewal | EUR 500.00/yr (Basic; waived over EUR 100/wk) |
| Setup fee | Not published | Not published | “We do not charge a fee to set up an account” | None stated beyond registration |
| Chargeback fee | Not published | Not published | $12.50 | “No” β but 2.5% rate surcharge if ratio β₯ 1.0% |
| Refund/credit fee | Not published | $0.05 gateway fee | $1 per credit | “No” |
| Reserve | Not published | Not published | “We do not require a security deposit nor do we withhold a reserve” | “All accounts have a 10% 6-month rolling reserve” |
| Recurring surcharge | Not published | Not published | Not published | “1.5% applies on all recurring transactions” |
Two entries deserve emphasis because they move real money.
Verotel’s reserve. A 10% six-month rolling reserve means roughly a tenth of your revenue is held for half a year on a rolling basis. Once the reserve matures it becomes a steady-state working-capital cost rather than a growing one, but for a business scaling quickly it is a real constraint on cash. Verotel is the only one of the four to publish its reserve terms, which is to its credit even though the terms themselves are the least favourable published here.
Verotel’s recurring surcharge. The published 1.5% “applies on all recurring transactions”. For a subscription business β which is most of adult β the effective rate is the tier rate plus that surcharge, so a 14.0% Premium tier is really 15.5% on rebills. Compare like with like.
Verotel’s chargeback structure is also different in kind. Instead of a per-chargeback fee it applies a rate penalty: “if this ratio is 1.0% or more, a surcharge of 2.5% will apply”. Epoch charges a flat $12.50 per chargeback instead. Which is cheaper depends entirely on your chargeback ratio, and a business that keeps chargebacks well under 1% is better off under Verotel’s structure than a per-event fee.
When You Actually Get Paid
Payout terms are where CCBill is by far the most transparent, and Epoch the least.
CCBill publishes a full schedule. The billing period “runs from Sunday to Saturday. On Tuesdays, we review the transactions on your account for the Billing Schedule Period and if a payout is necessary it will be sent the following Monday”. Method fees and minimums are itemised: ACH $5.00 with a $25.00 minimum, sent Mondays and arriving Tuesdays; ACH Express at “$15 per ACH Express payout” with a $100 minimum, sent for Friday receipt; SEPA “$10.00 USD per payout” with a $50.00 minimum; cheque by US mail from $0.78; FedEx from $15.00 two-day to $22.00 priority overnight. Its accounting documentation also notes that “Each subaccount can have up to ten (10) splits”, which matters if you pay creators or affiliates directly out of the processor.
Segpay “sends payouts every Tuesday”, by bank transfer, with a minimum balance field instructing merchants to “Enter 125 or higher. If your balance is less than this amount, the funds are held in your account until the next payout.” Notably, the currency of that 125 is not stated on the page, and no payout or wire fee is published.
Verotel advertises “Daily deposit of funds” through a Yoursafe Business Account, “Free of charge” β the fastest published cadence of the four. One caveat: Verotel’s example merchant agreement describes a weekly invoice paid 14 days after issue, which does not match the price chart. That document is labelled as an example, so the price chart is the better guide, but the discrepancy is worth resolving with them directly.
Epoch publishes no payout frequency, method, minimum or fee anywhere on its merchant pages.
Why Adult Rates Are 13β15%
The pricing is not arbitrary, and it is not simply processors charging what the market will bear. It follows from how the card networks classify adult merchants.
Visa’s public core rules β the 18 April 2026 edition β classify adult merchants under MCC 5967 (Adult Content and Services). Two rules attach directly to that code.
First, the merchant agreement itself must carry extra terms. Acquirers and payment facilitators must “Include the provisions specified in Section 3.1.1 of the Visa Integrity Risk Program Guide, if the Merchant is an adult content provider assigned with MCC 5967 (Adult Content and Services)”.
Second, non-compliance makes the transaction itself impermissible. Visa’s rules bar “The purchase of adult content or services using MCC 5967 (Adult Content and Services) where the Merchant, Ramp Provider or Sponsored Merchant is not compliant with all the requirements specified in Section 3.1.1 of the Visa Integrity Risk Program Guide”.
Here is the part worth sitting with: the Visa Integrity Risk Program Guide is not a public document. Visa’s published rules make compliance with Section 3.1.1 binding on every adult merchant, while the section itself is distributed separately. In practice you learn its contents through your processor, which is one concrete reason processors with detailed public compliance documentation are easier to work with than processors without.
Adult merchants sit in the high-integrity-risk category, which requires acquirer registration and ongoing monitoring. That registration cost is what surfaces on the price sheets as Epoch’s $1,950 annual Visa/Mastercard registration, CCBill’s “Visa $950” and “Mastercard $500 or $1000 (depending on region)”, and Verotel’s EUR 500.00. The percentage rate then carries the chargeback and monitoring exposure on top.
The 3-D Secure Trap
This is the single most expensive thing on this page, and it is almost never mentioned in processor comparisons.
In mainstream e-commerce, authenticating a transaction through 3-D Secure shifts fraud liability away from the merchant. Adult merchants in the US do not get that protection. Visa’s rules state that in the US Region, an acquirer “must notify its Merchant that its Secure Electronic Commerce Transactions are not eligible for Dispute protection from Dispute Condition 10.4: Other Fraud β Card-Absent Environment” when the merchant is classified under MCC 5967, alongside MCC 4829.
The dispute rules reinforce it: for US domestic e-commerce transactions by merchants assigned MCC 5967, the 10.4 dispute “applies, regardless of the Electronic Commerce Indicator value”.
In plain terms: you can authenticate a US cardholder through 3-D Secure, do everything correctly, and still absorb the fraud chargeback. This is why adult processors invest so heavily in pre-transaction fraud screening β Segpay lists device fingerprinting, velocity limits, negative database checks, AVS and CVV2 checks, and geo-location restrictions β and why descriptor clarity and responsive customer service matter more here than in mainstream retail. Prevention is the only real control you have, because authentication will not save you.
What Mastercard Requires of Adult Merchants
Mastercard’s requirements are public, unusually specific, and they apply through your processor regardless of which one you choose.
In a statement published on 14 April 2021, John Verdeschi, Senior Vice President for Franchise Customer Engagement and Performance, wrote that Mastercard was “extending our existing Specialty Merchant Registration requirements”, and that “The banks that connect merchants to our network will need to certify that the seller of adult content has effective controls in place to monitor, block and, where necessary, take down all illegal content.”
The listed requirements are:
- “Documented age and identity verification for all people depicted and those uploading the content”
- “Content review process prior to publication”
- “Complaint resolution process that addresses illegal or nonconsensual content within seven business days”
- “Appeals process allowing for any person depicted to request their content be removed”
That seven-business-day window is the only hard deadline any card network publishes for adult content, and it is an operational commitment, not a policy page. If you accept user-generated content, you need someone reachable enough to action a complaint inside a week, including over holidays.
Compliance Burden Compared
Here the ranking inverts. The two processors that publish the least about price publish the most about rules.
Segpay publishes the most detailed public compliance documentation of the four. Its user-generated content rules require merchants to “Verify the age and identity of all content creators using official government-issued ID documents”, obtain written consent from everyone appearing in content, “Review all content before it goes live on your website”, and β distinctively β “submit monthly reports to Segpay detailing how you handled UGC complaints or takedown requests”. It publishes an eleven-category prohibited content list that explicitly covers AI-generated material, requires a 2257 compliance statement and an 18+ warning, and states “We require all our clients to meet KYC, AML, and OFAC compliance requirements.” Its onboarding includes a “Website review to be sure payment disclosures, terms and conditions, privacy policy and age verification, and customer service links are included”. Its footer names its regulatory registrations, including an FCA firm reference number.
CCBill publishes a versioned acceptable use policy prohibiting, among other things, “extreme violence, incest, snuff, scat or the elimination of any bodily waste on another person, mutilation, or rape” and “any image using a model or models under the age of 18 years”. On record-keeping it places the duty on you, requiring merchants to “determine their legal responsibility to and method of complying with 18 U.S.C. 2257 where required to do so”. It states PCI DSS Level 1 compliance and 3DS 2.0 support, and points to named third-party vendors for age verification rather than performing it itself.
Verotel’s merchant agreement includes a 2257 clause allowing it to demand documentation at any time, and states that its content policy “will be sent on request and is published on www.verotel.com”. We could not find that policy: the obvious URL returns a 404. If you are considering Verotel, ask for the content policy in writing before signing, because the agreement treats it as binding.
Epoch is the outlier. Its merchant-facing pages do not mention adult content, age verification, 2257 record-keeping or prohibited content anywhere. Epoch publishes the clearest rate card of the four and the least about the rules that govern the category it serves. That is not evidence of a problem, but it does mean the compliance expectations arrive after you apply rather than before.
What None of Them Publish
An honest comparison has to include the gaps, because these are the questions to ask on the call:
- CCBill β the discount rate, any reserve or holdback, and whether a rolling reserve applies at all.
- Segpay β the discount rate, setup and annual fees, chargeback fee, reserve, payout and wire fees, and the currency of the 125 minimum.
- Epoch β payout frequency, methods, minimums and fees; and its entire adult-content compliance position.
- Verotel β the content policy its own agreement says is published; and which payout cadence actually governs.
Get every one of these in writing before you integrate. Migrating a subscription book between processors is painful β rebills have to be re-established, and you lose customers in the transfer β so the cost of choosing on an incomplete picture is paid later.
How to Choose
On the published evidence, rather than on reputation:
- If cash flow is the constraint, Epoch’s stated position that it does not withhold a reserve, and Verotel’s daily deposits, are the two published advantages. They pull in opposite directions, since Verotel publishes a 10% six-month reserve.
- If you run user-generated content, Segpay’s published requirements tell you exactly what you must build before applying, which is more useful than a lower quoted rate you cannot keep.
- If you pay creators or affiliates from the processor, CCBill’s documented ten-split subaccounts and itemised payout schedule are the most transparent published mechanics.
- If you want your own merchant account rather than a sub-merchant slot, Segpay is the only one of the four publicly offering direct underwriting through its acquiring relationships.
- If you are small and want to know the price today, Epoch and Verotel are the only two you can price without applying.
Whichever you pick, budget for the registration fee as a recurring annual cost, model the effective rate including any recurring surcharge rather than the headline tier, and assume you carry fraud risk on US transactions even with 3-D Secure in place.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which adult payment processor is cheapest?
Of those publishing rates, Verotel Premium’s 13.0% top tier is the lowest headline figure, but it adds 1.5% on recurring transactions and holds a 10% six-month rolling reserve. Epoch’s lowest published tier is 13.25% with no reserve withheld. For a subscription business, Epoch’s published terms are likely cheaper in practice. CCBill and Segpay publish no rate.
Why are adult processing rates so much higher than mainstream rates?
Adult merchants are classified under Visa’s MCC 5967 (Adult Content and Services), which carries high-integrity-risk registration, mandatory Integrity Risk Program compliance terms, ongoing monitoring, higher chargeback exposure, and β in the US β no 3-D Secure liability shift. The rate carries those costs and risks.
Does 3-D Secure protect an adult merchant from chargebacks?
Not in the US. Visa’s rules require acquirers to notify MCC 5967 merchants that their Secure Electronic Commerce Transactions “are not eligible for Dispute protection from Dispute Condition 10.4: Other Fraud β Card-Absent Environment”, and that the dispute applies “regardless of the Electronic Commerce Indicator value”. Pre-transaction fraud screening is the only real control.
What is MCC 5967?
It is the Visa merchant category code for “Adult Content and Services”. Visa’s public rules require the merchant agreement to include Visa Integrity Risk Program Guide Section 3.1.1 provisions for any adult content provider assigned this code, and bar processing where the merchant is not compliant with it.
How quickly must adult sites remove reported illegal content?
Mastercard’s published requirements specify a “Complaint resolution process that addresses illegal or nonconsensual content within seven business days”, alongside documented age and identity verification for everyone depicted and uploading, pre-publication content review, and an appeals process for removal requests.
Can I get my own merchant account instead of being a sub-merchant?
Segpay is the only one of these four publicly offering it, stating it has “relationships with nine acquiring banks that span the US, EU, and UK and can underwrite direct merchant accounts”. CCBill, Epoch and Verotel present payment facilitation, where you are a sub-merchant under their master account.
Can an adult business use Stripe or PayPal instead?
Mainstream processors generally prohibit sexually explicit content in their acceptable use policies, which is why specialist adult processors exist and why their pricing is structured differently. Check the current policy of any mainstream provider directly, since these terms change and vary by product and region.
The Short Version
Epoch and Verotel let you price the deal before you apply; CCBill and Segpay do not. Segpay tells you the most about what you must build to stay compliant; Epoch tells you the least. Verotel is the most transparent about its reserve and the most expensive on it. CCBill documents payouts and splits in the most detail. None of that ordering is what a rate comparison alone would suggest, which is the point.
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