On this page
- NOWPayments (15 October 2026): "300+ cryptocurrencies" in its home page headline, "350+" currencies on its pricing page, a 1% starting fee that excludes blockchain network fees, and enterprise pricing on request.
- Fianto: USDC on Solana only; the merchant pays nothing and receives the whole price in its own wallet; no Fianto fee during the beta.
- Recurring: NOWPayments emails an invoice link and renews automatically only through a ChangeNOW account; Fianto renewals are pulled from the customer's wallet within a cap they approved once.
Should you use NOWPayments or Fianto?
Use NOWPayments when the question is "which coins can my customers pay with", and Fianto when the answer is already "USDC on Solana". Fianto publishes this post, so read the Fianto side with that in mind; every NOWPayments fact comes from nowpayments.io, read on 15 October 2026, and is linked in the sources.
A quick rule, before the detail:
- If customers ask to pay in Bitcoin, Ether, USDT on Tron or any coin other than USDC on Solana, choose NOWPayments. Fianto cannot take those payments at all.
- If you want coins converted for you, or fiat involved anywhere, choose NOWPayments. Fianto has no conversion and no fiat payout.
- If your customers hold USDC on Solana and you want subscriptions that renew from their own wallet, choose Fianto.
- If every basis point of fee matters to you as the merchant, Fianto takes none from you; NOWPayments lists a 1% starting fee and its pricing page does not say who pays it.
Both are crypto payment gateways in the sense defined in what is a crypto payment gateway: a hosted page that tells the customer what to pay and tells the merchant when it arrived. They differ in what they accept and in what happens to the money.
How much does NOWPayments charge compared with Fianto?
NOWPayments' pricing page shows a 1% service fee as its headline figure on 15 October 2026, and its home page calls it a "1% starting fee with loyalty discounts" that "Excludes network fees required by blockchains". The page's description says fees get smaller if "your monthly asset flow increased up to certain amounts measured in BTC", but it publishes no thresholds, and enterprise pricing is "available on request". The pricing page does not say whether the merchant or the customer pays the fee.
A 100 USDC sale, worked through
| NOWPayments (published figures) | Fianto | |
|---|---|---|
| Service fee | 1.00 at the 1% starting rate | 0 during the beta; after it, about 0.10 to 0.50 on top, paid by the customer |
| Blockchain network fee | Excluded from the 1%; amount not published | The customer's Solana transaction fee, under $0.01 |
| Flat per-charge network fee | None published | None on a one-off payment (subscription charges only) |
| What the merchant receives | 100.00 less the fee, if the merchant bears it (not stated) | 100.00, in its own wallet |
On Fianto the merchant never pays a fee and never pays a Solana network fee: the price you set is what lands in your wallet. The customer needs a little SOL beside the USDC to pay the transaction fee, and the checkout tells them the exact amount. Subscriptions add a flat 0.01 USDC network fee to every charge today, the first included, on plans created since 6 October 2026, plus account rent the customer pays when subscribing, part of it returned after the subscription ends. Who pays which cost in a crypto payment is laid out in who pays the fees in a crypto payment.
Which coins and networks does each accept?
NOWPayments accepts a long list; Fianto accepts one token on one network. As of 15 October 2026 the NOWPayments home page says "Bitcoin, stablecoins and 300+ cryptocurrencies", the pricing page says "350+" currencies, and the supported-coins page lists USD Coin on Solana (USDCSOL) and Tether on Solana (USDTSOL) among them. Its home page also lists auto-conversion of coins.
Fianto takes USDC on Solana and nothing else, priced from 0.01 to 1,000,000 USDC. That narrowness is a choice with costs: a customer holding USDT, or USDC on Ethereum or Base, cannot pay you until they move it. If you are weighing which stablecoin to accept in the first place, USDC vs USDT for accepting payments compares the two.
How do recurring payments work on NOWPayments and on Fianto?
NOWPayments offers two recurring paths and Fianto one. According to NOWPayments' own guide, published on 8 October 2026, the merchant creates a plan priced in a fiat base currency and adds customers by email. NOWPayments then "sends the customer a branded email with a secure payment link to activate the subscription", and the customer picks how to pay the first invoice.
| NOWPayments, invoice flow | NOWPayments, ChangeNOW auto-renewal | Fianto | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How each renewal is paid | The customer pays a new invoice by hand | Initiated through the customer's ChangeNOW account after one authorisation | Pulled from the customer's own wallet within an on-chain cap they approved once |
| What the customer needs | Any supported wallet | A ChangeNOW account, with two-factor authentication when requested | A Solana wallet with USDC and a little SOL |
| Intervals | Any interval, including a custom number of days, weeks, months or years | 1, 7, 30 or 31, or 365 days | 30 days (monthly) or 365 days (yearly) |
| Limits | None stated | "$500 daily total per customer" | 0.01 to 1,000,000 USDC per price |
| Late payment | Grace period of 0 to 5 days | Grace period of 0 to 5 days, with retries in it | Four fixed attempts over about a day, then the subscription ends |
| Who can stop it | Not described; an unpaid renewal expires the subscription after the grace period | The customer, on the ChangeNOW side; the guide says the merchant cannot currently deactivate it from its dashboard | The customer in the portal at fianto.xyz/my; the merchant from the dashboard or the API |
One detail in the NOWPayments guide matters if you sell monthly: a customer who pays the first invoice from a regular wallet instead of ChangeNOW stays on the manual path, and "Future renewal invoices must be paid manually." Fianto has no manual path for subscriptions. A Fianto monthly plan bills every 30 days from the moment the customer subscribes, and a cancel in the portal runs to the end of the paid period. How that works on the chain is on the subscriptions page. Confirmo Subscribe, which collects stablecoin renewals under a spending approval, is compared in Confirmo Subscribe vs Fianto.
Take one-off USDC payments into your own wallet, with no merchant fee.
See the hosted checkoutDoes NOWPayments hold your money?
NOWPayments says its default is non-custodial, with an optional balance. Its post from 19 January 2023 says "Initially, it functions as a non-custodial service, which means users receive money through the processing system directly to their wallet." The same paragraph goes on: "However, users can store cryptocurrency on their balance within the NOWPayments account by using the optional custody solution." Check which mode your account uses; the post is older than the rest of the pages cited here.
Fianto has no balance to hold. The customer's own transaction sends the price to the merchant's wallet, and any fee to Fianto's, in the same transaction. Fianto broadcasts it and records the order as paid once the transaction is finalized on Solana; nothing is forwarded later. The step-by-step version is in the docs page How money moves, and the trade-offs between the two designs are in custodial vs non-custodial crypto payments.
What a Fianto checkout gives a developer
A Fianto one-off payment is a checkout session your server creates with POST /v1/checkout-sessions, keyed by your own order_. Creating it again for an order that is already paid returns 409 order_, so a retry in your code cannot charge a customer twice, and every POST needs an Idempotency-Key header. A session expires after 30 minutes by default. When the payment is final, your endpoint gets order. and checkout., signed under the Standard Webhooks scheme.
The SDK covers Next.js, Express and Hono on the server and plain JS and React in the browser. A merchant who writes no code can still sell through a USDC payment link or a shop. The page itself is described on the hosted checkout page.
What Fianto does not do
Fianto is the wrong choice for many merchants. It takes no coin but USDC on Solana. It has no conversion, no fiat payout and no card payments: turning USDC into bank money is a separate step, covered in turning USDC revenue into local currency. It has no test mode or sandbox, no invoices, no team accounts and no refund API; a refund is USDC you send back from your own wallet.
Every merchant is reviewed by a person at Fianto before taking payments, with no promised review time. A customer needs a Solana wallet that can sign transactions; an exchange account cannot pay. If several of those rule Fianto out for you, NOWPayments or another multi-coin gateway is the better pick. Everything above about NOWPayments is dated 15 October 2026.
- NOWPayments: pricing (read 15 October 2026)
- NOWPayments: home page (read 15 October 2026)
- NOWPayments: supported coins (read 15 October 2026)
- NOWPayments blog: How to set up recurring crypto payments (8 October 2026)
- NOWPayments blog: Which businesses will benefit from the custody solution? (19 January 2023)
- Solana documentation: transaction fees