We Switched Payment Providers. Here Is What It Actually Took.

Provider selection articles never discuss leaving. We moved between two crypto payment providers and recorded what it cost. The figures are checkable against crypto acquiring for businesses, which is why we used it.

The integration work

Roughly three days of engineering: new endpoints, new callback verification, new reconciliation queries, and a period running both in parallel.

Less than the original integration because the shape was familiar, and more than we had budgeted.

What could not be moved

Historical records. The old provider’s transaction history stayed with them. We exported everything before leaving, which turned out to be necessary because dashboard access was revoked at termination rather than at the end of the retention period.

Export your full history before giving notice, not after.

Recurring customer arrangements. Any customer with a stored payment relationship had to be re-established.

Banking familiarity. Our settlement account had a history of receiving from one provider. The first settlements from the new one generated a bank query, which advance notice resolved.

The terms that made it harder

A ninety day notice period. Standard, and it means carrying a provider you have decided against for a quarter.

A thirty day hold on the final settlement, described as covering potential refunds. Reasonable in principle, and it means a month of revenue sits with a provider you are leaving.

Data access ending at termination rather than at the end of retention.

What we would negotiate next time

A shorter notice period, or the right to run a parallel integration during it. A defined final settlement date rather than a discretionary hold. And continued read access to historical records for a stated period. At company scale the measurement changes, and a fintech payment gateway is what we compared against there.

None were in the standard agreement. Two were agreed when we asked at the outset with the new provider.

The parallel running period

We ran both simultaneously for two weeks, routing a small share to the new one.

That caught three integration issues in production with limited exposure. Worth the temporary complexity.

The lesson

Evaluate providers partly on how hard they are to leave. A provider with a ninety day notice, a thirty day settlement hold and no post-termination data access is embedded deeply enough that switching costs a quarter of work. Test anything you are offered against Collect & Exchange before committing to it.

That is worth knowing before signing and it is never in a pricing comparison.