Nickel vs. QuickBooks Payments

QuickBooks Payments is Intuit's payment processor built into QuickBooks Online and Desktop. When you email an invoice from QuickBooks, your customer can pay it by card, ACH, Apple Pay, or PayPal and Venmo, and the payment records against the invoice automatically. There's no monthly fee for the processing itself, though it requires a QuickBooks Online subscription ($38 to $340 a month depending on the plan, which also sets your user count at 1, 3, 5, or 25).

The fees are per transaction. ACH bank payments cost 1% of the invoice, and for accounts opened on or after September 6, 2023 there is no cap; older accounts kept a per-payment cap that rose from $10 to $15. Invoiced card payments are 2.99% online (3.5% keyed, 2.5% swiped), and instant deposits cost 1.75%. Paying vendors is a separate product, QuickBooks Bill Pay, which now includes standard ACH at $0 and mails checks for $1.50.

Nickel doesn't replace QuickBooks; it replaces the processing layer underneath it. You connect QuickBooks Online in about five minutes (or QuickBooks Desktop through the Web Connector), and customers, vendors, invoices, bills, payments, and your chart of accounts sync both ways. You send invoices from either system, your customer pays through a Nickel payment link, and the payment posts back to QuickBooks against the right invoice.

ACH is free on every plan, including the $0 Core plan, with no percentage and no cap. Cards are a flat 2.9%, and you choose whether you or your customer pays it. Core includes 3 users and a $25,000 per-transaction limit; Plus ($35/month) raises the limit to $1M per transfer. Instant transfers through Nickel Balance are free. Live chat and email support are included on every plan.

Percentages hide the size of the fee on B2B invoices. A $50,000 invoice paid by ACH through QuickBooks Payments costs $500. The same transfer through your bank's ACH network costs a few dollars at most, and through Nickel it costs nothing. The 2023 change that removed the cap on new accounts turned a fee that used to top out at $10 or $15 into one that scales with your revenue.

This is a receivables problem specifically. On the payables side, QuickBooks Bill Pay now sends standard ACH for $0, so the fee only bites when customers pay you. That is where a two-way sync matters most: Nickel collects the payment at $0 and QuickBooks still gets the record. Our guides to QuickBooks payment processing fees and how to avoid QuickBooks ACH fees walk through the mechanics, including surcharging card payments.

On ACH, it isn't close. A business collecting $200,000 a month across 25 invoices pays QuickBooks Payments $2,000 a month, or $24,000 a year, at 1% uncapped. A legacy account with the $15 cap pays $375 a month. Nickel collects the same $200,000 for $0, and because each invoice averages $8,000, the free Core plan covers it. Cards are close: a $10,000 invoice costs $299 at QuickBooks' 2.99% invoiced rate versus $290 at Nickel's 2.9%, and on Nickel you can pass that fee to the customer. Instant deposits are 1.75% on QuickBooks and free through Nickel Balance.

QuickBooks Payments wins on a few lines: swiped in-person cards at 2.5% (Nickel has no POS), next-business-day card deposits, and mailed checks at $1.50 through Bill Pay versus $2 on Nickel. Full details are on our pricing page. Intuit's are at quickbooks.intuit.com/payments, and every QuickBooks figure on this page was checked against Intuit's pricing, help, and community pages on August 28, 2026. We also compare Nickel with Melio, Bill.com, and Square.