Comparing Malaysian payment gateways looks simple until you notice one charges “RM1.00 flat”, another “1.5%”, a third “1.2% + RM1.00”, and a fourth will not tell you without a sales call. This guide explains every fee shape you will meet and a fair way to compare them.
The four fee shapes
Percentage (MDR). The merchant discount rate is a cut of each sale: 1.5% on RM200 is RM3. Cards and e-wallets are almost always priced this way. What a card rate really costs scales with your ticket size.
Flat fee. A fixed ringgit amount per transaction, common for FPX: RM1.00 at toyyibPay, RM1.25 at Billplz. Flat fees get cheaper (in percentage terms) as tickets grow and brutal as tickets shrink.
Percent plus fixed. Both at once, like HitPay’s 1.2% + RM1.00 cards or Stripe’s 3% + RM1.00. The fixed part dominates small tickets; the percentage dominates big ones.
Setup and recurring platform fees. Most SME gateways charge RM0 upfront, but exceptions exist (toyyibPay’s card onboarding is RM100, some acquirers charge annual fees). A “free” gateway with a higher MDR can cost more than a paid one within months.
Channels are priced differently
The same gateway charges differently per channel, and the spread is wide:
- FPX: the workhorse. Flat RM1.00 to RM1.25 at the cheapest providers, percentage-based (1.8% or more) elsewhere.
- Cards: the expensive lane, roughly 1.2% to 3% for local cards, more for international.
- E-wallets: typically 1.5% to 2.2%, sometimes priced per wallet.
- DuitNow QR: usually the cheapest percentage channel, around 1% to 1.5%.
- BNPL: the priciest, commonly 2% to 6.5%, because the provider carries instalment risk.
How to compare fairly: one basket, one number
Headline rates mislead because they hide the shapes above. The method this site uses (and publishes) is a blended cost on a RM100 basket, weighted 50% FPX, 30% card, 20% e-wallet, using each gateway’s published official rates. That single number is the “Est. fee / RM100” column in the directory and the ranking behind the cheapest-gateway list.
The table below shows four popular gateways side by side, rendered live from the verified dataset. Two things to remember when reading it: providers that publish nothing are ranked nowhere (we never guess), and settlement speed is a real cost too; T+1 versus T+7 is a week of cash flow. Test your own numbers in the fee calculator or answer four questions in Help me choose.
