Payment processors that take adult, and what we learned going through their applications

Sooner or later every adult webmaster who sells something directly hits the same wall. The payment tools everyone else uses say no, and the ones that say yes ask for a file thick enough to be a book. We've been through that this year for Jimp, which sells subscriptions to people who run adult sites, so we spent weeks reading processor terms and answering underwriting questions. None of this is legal or tax advice, and we won't name who we're talking to until something is signed. What follows is the part that's useful to anyone.

First, do you actually need one

A lot of people start looking for a processor when they don't need one. If your site sends visitors to cam platforms and paysites on your affiliate codes, the programs collect the money and pay you. You need a way to get paid by the programs (wire, SEPA, Paxum and the like, depending on the program), not a way to charge cards.

You need a processor the day you charge a visitor yourself. A membership, clips for sale, a subscription to your own content, a paid tool. That's a different business, with different rules, and it's worth being sure you want it before you start the paperwork.

The mainstream ones are closed, and they say so

This saves time, so we'll be blunt. Stripe's restricted businesses list prohibits pornography and adult content, and says so explicitly for AI-generated content meeting the same criteria. PayPal's acceptable use policy prohibits "certain sexually oriented materials or services", and its help page on the subject rules out digital goods in that category. Getting approved by mistake is worse than being refused, because the account gets closed later with the money in it.

So the adult market has its own processors. Some have been doing it for decades and list adult as a category they serve openly, CCBill for instance puts "Adult Business" right in its navigation. Others are general high-risk processors that take adult alongside other sectors. Both kinds exist, and the right one depends on what you sell more than on who's biggest.

Why the file is so thick

The card networks set the rules, and processors pass them down to you. Mastercard tightened its standards for adult content merchants in 2021 (their newsroom post is here). In short, the banks that sign up adult merchants must make sure those merchants verify the age and identity of everyone depicted, have their consent, review content before it's published, and handle complaints about illegal content quickly.

That's why applications ask about things that look unrelated to payments. How you verify who uploads. Where your 2257 records are kept. How a takedown request reaches you and how fast you act. What your terms say about prohibited content. If you run user uploads, expect the most questions. If you sell a tool or a service rather than content, expect fewer, but they still want to understand what your customers do with it, because you're in the sector either way.

The practical lesson from our side is to write those processes down before you apply, not while filling in the form. An underwriter can tell a policy that exists from one invented on the spot, and a refused application tends to follow you.

What to ask before you sign

These are the questions we ended up sending, and we'd send them again. None of them are exotic, and a processor that can't answer them clearly is telling you something.

Which currencies can you charge in, on the same merchant account, and what do you settle in? If you charge in euros and get paid in dollars, someone converts, and it's usually you who pays for it.

Does every notification you send back carry the amount and the currency that were actually charged? If your system activates an account on "payment received" without checking what was received, you'll have a bad day eventually.

Does a subscription keep its currency and its amount at each renewal? Can the amount of a running subscription change, for an upgrade, without the customer signing up again? Some processors built around hosted payment forms simply can't do this, and your whole plan-change logic depends on the answer.

Do you add anything on top of the amount we send, a tax or a fee shown to the customer? Or do you charge exactly our amount?

Do you pass back the card's country and the billing address? In the EU you need location evidence for VAT, and the processor is often where it comes from.

Are you merchant of record? This one decides a lot. When the processor is merchant of record, it's legally the seller, and it may collect and remit sales tax or VAT for you. When it isn't, you're the seller, and the tax is your job.

VAT, the part nobody enjoys

If you sell digital services to consumers in the EU, VAT is due in the customer's country, not yours, once your cross-border sales pass a threshold. The EU's One-Stop Shop lets you declare all of it from one portal in your own country instead of registering everywhere, and the Commission's page gives the EUR 10,000 threshold for cross-border B2C sales.

Two consequences for pricing. Show prices VAT included to European consumers if you can, because a price that grows at checkout loses sales. And decide early whether your price is the same everywhere, meaning your margin varies with each country's rate, or your margin is fixed and the price varies. We picked the first, a round price that's the final price everywhere in Europe, and accepted the smaller margin in high-VAT countries.

Chargebacks and statements

Adult has a reputation for chargebacks, some of it earned. A customer sees an unfamiliar name on their statement, doesn't remember the purchase, and calls the bank. The processor's name is often what appears on the statement, not yours, so tell customers in plain words what they'll see, at checkout and in the receipt. It's the cheapest chargeback prevention there is.

Keep cancellation easy. A subscription that's hard to cancel doesn't earn more, it gets charged back, and every chargeback costs a fee on top of the refund and counts against you with the processor.

What we'd tell someone starting today

Pick the processor for what you sell. A content paysite, a cam-style token system and a software subscription have very different needs, and a processor that's perfect for one can be clumsy for another.

Keep your payment logic independent of the processor. We built ours so that a processor is one piece you can swap, with our own record of what was charged checked against what the processor says. Processors change terms, drop sectors and sometimes close accounts. The less your site depends on one of them, the less a letter from their compliance team can hurt you.

And talk to more than one. Terms differ more than the websites suggest, and the questions above surface the differences fast.

If you've been through an application recently, adult or high-risk, what did they ask that surprised you? Say which processor if you're comfortable with it, and whether you have a stake in it.