GoCardless review: products, technology and pricing (2026)

GoCardless is a bank payments provider that lets businesses collect recurring and one-off payments directly from customers' bank accounts, using national Direct Debit schemes and open banking rather than cards. What sets its technology apart is a single API object, the Billing Request, that can combine a Direct Debit mandate, an instant Pay by Bank payment and variable recurring payments in one customer journey, with machine learning used to retry failed collections.

At a glance

Key figures

GoCardless's press page still shows older, undated figures (85,000 businesses and US$35bn a year), so we use the dated press release numbers above.

How the platform works

GoCardless sits between a business and the bank payment schemes. Its API has two directions: collecting money from payers and sending money out from a funded payment account to customers, suppliers or other third parties.

On the collection side there are two underlying models. With Direct Debit, the payer authorises a mandate once and the business then creates payments against it, which GoCardless submits to the local scheme (Bacs in the UK, SEPA in the eurozone, ACH in the US and so on). With Pay by Bank, the payer approves each payment in their banking app and the money moves over instant rails: Faster Payments for sterling and SEPA Instant for euros. Variable recurring payments (VRP), available in sterling only, sit in between: the payer gives open banking consent once and later payments run without further approval. Our open banking payments explainer covers the difference between these models.

The Billing Request is the glue. It holds the customer, their authorisation, bank details and payment details in one object, so a single flow can, for example, take an instant first payment and set up a Direct Debit for later ones. Three front ends run on the same API:

Risk tooling is layered on top. Success+ retries payments that fail for insufficient funds on a date its model predicts is most likely to work. Protect+ adds fraud detection, payer verification, monitoring and chargeback challenges, and can send riskier payers through a Verified Mandates flow. GoCardless says these tools draw on its own payment data: tens of millions of payments, about 600,000 unique payers, 30,000 organisations and payers from 37 countries (undated figures on its support site, checked 3 November 2026). In its August 2026 Recurring Pay by Bank launch it also described routing payers to Direct Debit when open banking is unavailable, and a "bank guess" feature that pre-fills details from payer history.

Products

Direct Debit

The original product. A mandate covers future collections, and payments can be one-off, subscriptions or instalment plans. Subscriptions and instalments are available on every scheme GoCardless supports.

Pay by Bank

One-off instant payments with no mandate. The payer confirms in their banking app and funds move over Faster Payments or SEPA Instant. This is the same account-to-account model used by Trustly and TrueLayer.

Recurring Pay by Bank and VRP

Open banking-based recurring payments, launched commercially in August 2026 with utility supplier Data Energy on a new UK scheme run by the UK Payments Initiative. Data Energy uses it for automatic energy meter top-ups.

Success+

A retry engine for failed Direct Debits. It only acts on insufficient-funds failures, identified by scheme reason codes, and only when the merchant has switched it on for that scheme. The developer docs cite an average recovery of 71% of failed payments (undated, checked 3 November 2026). Webhooks tell the merchant whether a retry will happen, which matters because collecting the money another way could double-charge the payer.

Protect+ and Verified Mandates

Protect+ has four parts: Detect, Verify, Monitor and Challenge. Detect and Monitor work across the main schemes; Verify covers ACH, Autogiro, Bacs and SEPA in Germany and France; Challenge (chargeback disputes) is Bacs only. It is included in the Pro plan transaction fee. Merchants can also maintain blocklists through the API's Blocks endpoint.

Payouts

Outbound payments from a funded GoCardless account to customers, suppliers or other third parties, using the same API.

Developer experience and integrations

Access tokens are created in the dashboard and shown once. The REST API can also be called directly with a bearer token. On the partner side, GoCardless says it connects to more than 350 platforms (September 2026); partners can add their own app fee to payments, which appears as a separate line for the merchant.

Payment methods, currencies and coverage

International collections (outside the payer's home scheme) are charged in the payer's currency. For how instant rails compare with batch schemes, see our guide to real-time payments.

Pricing model

GoCardless publishes UK plan pricing on its support site. The page shows no update date; we checked it on 3 November 2026.

How the rest of the fee structure works, according to GoCardless:

• Domestic fees are a percentage plus a fixed fee, capped. International fees use the same formula but are uncapped.
• A high-value surcharge applies above a threshold in the UK and Australia.
• Refunds carry a fixed fee. Failure and chargeback fees apply in the US, Germany and Austria.
• Transaction fees apply to every submitted payment, whether or not it succeeds.
• Add-ons such as custom checkout pages carry a monthly fee; amounts are not published on the comparison page.
• Charities get 25% off standard transaction fees.
• Custom-priced accounts are invoiced rather than having fees deducted at source.

International fee levels for each plan were not published on the comparison page as of 3 November 2026.

Recent launches

Mollie says customers of both companies will see no immediate change to services or contracts, with integration to follow in phases (1 September 2026).

Regulation in brief

GoCardless states that it is authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority under the Payment Services Regulations 2017, in the company details published with its September 2026 announcement. Since September 2026 it has been part of the Mollie group. Our guide on how to check a financial licence explains how to confirm an authorisation on the FCA register, and our PSD3 and PSR page covers EU rule changes that affect open banking providers.

Who it tends to suit

• Subscription, membership and invoicing businesses that collect regularly from bank accounts in the UK, eurozone, Nordics, North America or Australasia.
• Utilities and other billers that want a mix of Direct Debit and instant bank payments in one integration.
• Software platforms that want to embed bank payments for their own customers through a partner integration.
• Charities, which get a published discount.

Merchants whose customers mostly pay by card or wallet at checkout may compare GoCardless with card-led providers such as Stripe, or with its parent Mollie. More profiles are on our open banking hub.