Ranked #2 of 46 · checked 2026-08-31
NOWPayments review
NOWPayments scores 8.0 of 10 on this index and ranks #2 of 46. Processing starts at a published 1%. It lists 350+ assets. Verification is not disclosed. It publishes 68% of the fields tracked here.
Widest published asset list in the category, at a flat rate, non-custodial by default.
- Score
- 8.0/10
- Processing from
- 1%
- Assets listed
- 350+
- Merchant verification
- Not disclosed
- Custody
- Non custodial
- Discloses
- 68%
NOWPayments at a glance
Provider site| Processing from | 1% |
|---|---|
| Conversion | |
| Payouts | |
| Assets listed | 350+ |
| Networks | Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Tron, Solana, Polygon, Litecoin |
| Merchant verification | Not disclosed |
| Custody | Non custodial, settlement reaches a merchant wallet |
| Jurisdiction | Not stated on the provider's public pages |
| Operating since | 2019 |
| Integrations |
A dash means the provider does not publish the figure, not that we did not look. Fee figures come from the provider's own pricing page.
What can NOWPayments do?
Verticals the provider names publicly: ecommerce, saas, nonprofit, igaming.
How does NOWPayments score?
Weights| Criterion | Weight | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Assets, networks and geography How many assets and chains are live for merchants, and in which markets settlement actually works. | 25 | 9 |
| All-in cost Processing percentage, conversion spread and payout cost taken together, not the headline number alone. | 25 | 8 |
| Onboarding and verification What a merchant must submit before going live, how long it takes, and which verticals are refused outright. | 20 | 8 |
| Integrations and API Maintained plugins, API surface, webhook reliability and whether a developer can reach a test transaction from public docs alone. | 18 | 8 |
| Support and operations Reachable channels, published response commitments, and documented handling of underpayment and wrong-network sends. | 12 | 6 |
| Weighted total | 8.0 |
NOWPayments across the five criteria
Scored 0–10 · weighted total 8.0
Where it is strong
- The published asset list is the longest of any provider in this index, at 350+ currencies.
- A single 1% service fee with no tiering to negotiate, stated openly on the pricing page.
- Non-custodial flow means settlement reaches a merchant-controlled wallet rather than a provider balance.
Where it is weak
- Conversion and payout costs are not published, so the all-in figure cannot be computed from public pages.
- Merchant verification requirements are not documented publicly, which makes onboarding hard to plan for.
On this page
What does the flat rate actually buy you?#
Predictability, which is rarer in this category than a low number. A rate that applies from the first transaction means a small merchant pays the same percentage as a large one, and that removes the negotiation most competitors build into their pricing. It also means the figure on the page is the figure you get, which is not true of the providers advertising lower floors.
What it does not buy is completeness. The published rate covers processing and nothing else, and neither conversion nor payout cost appears anywhere on the page. For a merchant settling in crypto that gap barely matters, since there is nothing to convert. For one wanting bank currency it matters enormously, because the unpublished component is usually the larger one.
Who is the asset list actually for?#
Merchants whose customers are unpredictable. A store selling into a handful of known markets will never touch more than a dozen assets, and the other three hundred are inventory nobody uses. A marketplace, a donation platform or a business selling worldwide meets the long tail constantly, and every unsupported asset is a sale that quietly does not happen.
That is the discriminating question rather than the raw number. Ask yourself whether you have ever lost a sale to an asset you could not accept. If the answer is no and your customer base is stable, breadth here is not worth paying for.
What the non-custodial design changes#
Settlement reaches a wallet you control rather than a balance the provider holds, which removes the one failure in this category you cannot recover from. That is worth more than most of the criteria this index scores, and it is why the custody guide argues for checking it first.
The cost is that fiat conversion is not on the table in the same way, and volatility management stays with you. A business already holding stablecoins loses nothing. A business whose finance function will not carry a crypto balance is looking at the wrong provider, regardless of the rate.
What to ask before signing#
The conversion spread as a number, and the payout cost split into provider fee and network fee. Those two answers turn a published floor into a comparable total, and without them this card cannot be weighed against one from a provider that publishes everything.
What merchant verification requires for your jurisdiction and vertical, since nothing about it is published. Treat an undocumented process as longer than a documented one rather than lighter, and get the answer before you build.
Who should not choose this#
A business that has to justify a vendor choice with a total cost figure. Two of the three cost components are unpublished, and no amount of asset coverage answers a procurement question about monthly spend. A provider publishing a full table will win that conversation regardless of which is actually cheaper.
A business whose finance function needs euro or dollars arriving in a bank account on a schedule. The non-custodial design that makes this card attractive on risk is exactly what puts conventional fiat settlement out of reach, and fighting that is choosing the wrong tool.
How this card scores where it does#
Coverage carries the highest available score here because the published asset list is genuinely the widest in the index, and coverage carries the joint-highest weight in the method. Cost scores well on the flat published rate and is held back by the two unpublished components.
Onboarding scores above average despite the undisclosed verification, on the reasoning that a non-custodial provider has structurally less to verify. Support is the weakest line and the least verifiable, which is why it carries the smallest weight.
Where NOWPayments sits in the index#
The short version of this card: the widest published asset list here, at a rate that does not move. Every figure above was read off the provider's own pages on 2026-08-31, and the fields it declines to publish are recorded as such rather than left blank.
If you disagree with the order, the criterion to move is coverage. It carries the joint-highest weight and it is where this card earns most of its position, so pushing it down reshuffles the top of the index considerably. The methodology page does that live.
How should you read this card?
The score of 8.0 comes from the five weighted criteria above, applied identically to every provider in the catalogue. If you weight the criteria differently, the methodology page re-ranks the whole index against your weights, and the order you get is as valid as this one.
The disclosure figure of 68% is a separate measurement and often the more useful one. It counts only the fields NOWPayments publishes itself, so it predicts how much of your evaluation will happen over email rather than from documentation. If you are already using NOWPayments and looking to leave, the switching page covers the closest replacements.
What NOWPayments does not disclose
Checked against the provider's own pages on 2026-08-31. NOWPayments does not publish what conversion costs, what payouts cost, what merchant verification it requires, which ecommerce platforms it supports, whether it settles to fiat, whether white label is available.
Ask for each of these in writing before signing. A provider that answers a factual question with positioning has told you something useful about the next two years.
NOWPayments compared
All comparisons- NOWPayments vs CoinGate
- NOWPayments vs Cryptomus
- NOWPayments vs BitPay
- NOWPayments vs CoinPayments
- NOWPayments vs CoinsPaid
- NOWPayments vs Plisio
- NOWPayments vs Speend
- NOWPayments vs CoinRemitter
- NOWPayments vs BTCPay Server
- NOWPayments vs OpenNode
- NOWPayments vs OxaPay
- NOWPayments vs Radom
- NOWPayments vs Paymento
Where else NOWPayments appears
Questions about NOWPayments
Is NOWPayments legit?
NOWPayments has operated since 2019 and does not state a jurisdiction on its public pages. It publishes 68% of the fields this index tracks. Nothing here is a security assessment: run your own checks on custody and settlement before sending volume through any processor.
What does NOWPayments charge?
The published processing rate starts at 1%, checked 2026-08-31. Conversion cost is not published, so this is a floor rather than an all-in figure.
Does NOWPayments require KYC?
NOWPayments does not publish its merchant verification requirements. That is a planning risk rather than an answer, and it is why this card scores as it does on onboarding.
What are the best NOWPayments alternatives?
The three closest substitutes are CoinGate, Cryptomus, Coinbase Commerce. Which one fits depends on whether you are leaving over cost, coverage or onboarding.