Bulgarian.LLC – Your trusted partner for company formation, business and legal services in Bulgaria. We build solid foundations for your success!
Payments, banking and the software behind them
Getting paid online has three separate failure points, and most providers only sell you one of them. You need an acquirer that accepts your category, a bank that will hold the money, and the technical work that connects both to your checkout. We do all three, at fixed prices, and we tell you which part is actually your problem before you pay for any of it.
Start here
People arrive here describing the symptom rather than the cause. “Stripe closed my account.” “The bank will not open for a foreign owner.” “The gateway works in test but not in production.” Those are four different problems with four different fixes, and buying the wrong fix is how a three-week delay becomes a three-month one.
Applications declined, or approved then closed. Usually this is the merchant category code, the volume forecast, or something on the website that failed review before a human ever read the file. It is rarely the business itself.
Supplements, travel, subscriptions, gaming, adult, crypto-adjacent, forex, nutraceuticals, CBD. The account exists, but at 5–7% and a rolling reserve you cannot plan around. The fix is placement plus negotiation, not another application.
An acquirer needs somewhere to send the money. Foreign-owned companies get refused by banks for reasons the bank will not explain, and the acquirer approval is worthless until this is solved.
Approved, but nothing is live. Sandbox works and production does not, 3DS fails on half the cards, webhooks arrive twice, refunds do not reconcile. This is development work and it needs a developer, not an account manager.
An international processor at 2.9–7% when local acquiring starts near 0.79% for domestic and EEA traffic. On real volume that gap is the difference between a viable margin and a dead one.
Marketplace split payments, subscription billing, multi-currency, a platform that has to move money between its own users. Off-the-shelf plugins stop exactly where these requirements start.
No charge, no call required
Answer what applies. You get a written assessment of which services your situation actually needs, what each one costs, and what we would do first — before anyone asks you for money. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, that is what it will say.
Answer a series of practical questions about your intended business. The tool generates a personalised preliminary setup profile based on deterministic assessment rules and the Bulgarian.LLC services configured by the administrator.
No registration is required to view your preliminary result.
The hardest case
“High risk” is not a judgement about your business. It is a merchant category code that tells an acquirer how likely it is to face chargebacks, refunds and regulatory attention. The code decides your rate, your rolling reserve, and often whether you are accepted at all — and it is argued, not assigned by nature.
Most merchants discover their category only after a decline. By then the application has left a trace, and the next acquirer can see it. This is why scattering applications across the market is the most expensive thing you can do: each refusal makes the next approval harder and the terms worse.
This card is property of the issuing bank. Use of this card is governed by the cardholder agreement. If found, please return to the nearest branch.
This card is property of the issuing bank. Use of this card is governed by the cardholder agreement. If found, please return to the nearest branch.
This card is property of the issuing bank. Use of this card is governed by the cardholder agreement. If found, please return to the nearest branch.
Four things, in roughly this order of weight. The category argument — whether your business is genuinely the code an underwriter would assign, or whether a defensible case puts it somewhere better. The forecast — volume, average order value and expected chargeback ratio, evidenced rather than asserted. The website — terms, refund policy, contact details, currency disclosure, and whether what you sell matches what the page says you sell. The company — ownership, banking, and whether the entity looks like it can absorb a bad month.
Three of those four are within your control before you apply. That is the work.
The headline percentage is the number everyone negotiates and the least important one. The rolling reserve — how much of your revenue the acquirer holds, and for how long — decides your cash flow. A 10% reserve released after 180 days means a tenth of six months of revenue is not yours. The chargeback threshold decides how long the account survives; cross it and you are back at the start, now with a closure on record.
All three are negotiable at the point of placement and very difficult to renegotiate afterwards.
We are paid by you, not by the acquirer. Most placement brokers earn a commission from the institution they place you with, which is why so few of them publish a fee. We do not take that commission, so we can place you where the terms are best rather than where our cut is largest. What we charge is on this page and nowhere else.
The part that is actually software
Payment gateway integration is where most projects stall, and it is the part sold as an afterthought. Approval is an outcome. Integration is a build. The two get sold as one thing and they are not: an acquirer can approve you in a week and leave you three months from taking a live payment, because connecting a gateway to a real checkout is engineering work with its own failure modes.
If you are on WooCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop or OpenCart and the gateway publishes an official plugin, this is configuration rather than construction. It still has to be done properly: sandbox testing, a live low-value verification transaction, currency and refund settings, and the compliance pages the acquirer re-checks before it lets you go live. Skipping the last of those is a common reason an approved account never activates.
Direct payment API integration is required once your requirements stop matching what a plugin assumes. A plugin implements the common path; an API implements yours. In practice that means one of these:
We quote custom work after a technical scoping call, not before. A fixed number offered before anyone has seen your checkout is a number that will change, and it is better to say so now.
Where the money lands
An acquirer approval is only as useful as the business bank account it settles into. For a Bulgarian company with foreign owners this is frequently the slowest part of the whole chain, and it is the part most payment consultants leave to you.
One thing to be clear about: a real Bulgarian bank account is not opened entirely at a distance. Remote onboarding exists, but in practice it fits entities represented by a Bulgarian citizen holding a local electronic identity — not a foreign director. If the owners are abroad, plan for someone to attend in person. What can be arranged remotely is an account with an electronic money institution, which lets the company invoice and receive payment while the bank account is arranged properly.
We handle the bank as its own engagement, with its own fixed price, including re-placement with a second and a third bank if the first declines. A refusal from one bank is rarely a verdict on the company — it is usually a verdict on the fit.
The detail sits in our guide to opening a Bulgarian company bank account and in the comparison of Bulgarian banks for non-residents.
Fixed price
These are engagement fees, not advisory time. Institutional charges — an acquirer’s setup fee and per-transaction pricing, a bank’s KYC review fee and account fees — belong to those institutions and are never inside ours.
| Engagement | What it covers | Fee |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant account — standard MCC | Classification, forecast, KYB pack, website review, placement, rate and reserve negotiated. | 1 200 € |
| Merchant account — high-risk MCC | The same work where the category is priced and reviewed as elevated risk. | 2 000 € |
| Local Bulgarian acquiring | Placement with a Bulgarian bank. From around 0.79% on domestic and EEA card traffic, and the only route for a physical POS. | 1 100 € |
| Payment gateway integration — existing platform | Official plugin on an existing platform, tested end to end and verified live. | 450 € |
| Payment API integration — custom development | Direct API work. Quoted after a technical scoping call. | from 1 500 € |
| Bank account — with company formation | The account as part of a formation engagement. | 300 € |
| Bank account — on its own, in person | Includes re-placement with up to three banks if the first declines. | 900 € |
| Remote business account | Revolut or Paysera, opened without travelling. Not a Bulgarian bank account. | 600 € |
| Bank account — after a refusal | Diagnosis of why the previous application was declined, then re-placement. | 2 400 € |
The full list, including formation, accounting, VAT, licensing and immigration work, is on the price list.
The part nobody sells you
Approval feels like the finish line and is closer to the starting one. A merchant account is a relationship the acquirer reviews continuously, and most closures happen to businesses that were approved without difficulty months earlier. Knowing what is being watched changes how you operate from the first transaction.
Card schemes monitor chargebacks as a percentage of transactions, and the thresholds are lower than most merchants expect. Cross them and the account moves into a monitoring programme with fines attached; stay there and it closes. The ratio is calculated on the current month’s transactions, which means a sales dip during a chargeback wave can push the percentage over on its own, without anything getting worse.
Most avoidable chargebacks are not fraud. They are unrecognised descriptors on a statement, a refund that took too long, a subscription the customer forgot renews, or a delivery date that slipped without an email. Fixing the descriptor and the refund turnaround usually does more for the ratio than any fraud tool.
The forecast you submitted is what the acquirer underwrote. Exceeding it substantially triggers a review, and a review can freeze settlement while it runs. If you are about to launch a campaign that will triple a month, tell the acquirer before it happens rather than after — a warned acquirer raises the limit, an ambushed one holds the funds.
A new product line, a different country, a change of ownership, a new website, a switch of platform. Each one alters the risk profile the account was priced against, and each one is normally a clause in the agreement requiring notice. Merchants breach these clauses constantly without realising, and it only surfaces when something else goes wrong and the file gets read.
None of this is a reason to avoid card payments. It is a reason to treat the account as infrastructure that needs maintaining rather than a switch that was flipped once.
Why this runs through Bulgaria
You do not need a Bulgarian company to work with us on integration or on an international merchant account. But for a business selling into Europe, a Bulgarian entity changes three things that matter to payments specifically.
Bulgarian bank acquiring — the route that starts near 0.79% for domestic and EEA card traffic rather than 2.9–7% — requires the merchant to be a Bulgarian legal entity. That is not a preference of ours; it is who the acquirer will contract with. For a business doing meaningful European volume, the rate difference alone can justify the structure, and it is the only path to a physical POS terminal.
Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026. Accounts are denominated in EUR and transfers within the SEPA zone are processed as domestic transfers. For a merchant this removes the currency conversion that used to sit between a euro-priced sale and a lev-denominated account — presentment, settlement and payout are now the same currency for most European sales.
Flat, on profits, with no reduced or elevated bands. It is the reason most people look at Bulgaria in the first place, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up: 10% is low within the EU, it is not zero, and it applies to a company that files properly and has real substance. A structure built only to hold a merchant account, with no operations behind it, is a structure that fails a bank review before it ever faces a tax authority.
If the company is the missing piece, we form it — and the bank account then costs 300 € as part of that engagement rather than 900 € on its own. See how company formation works for foreign founders.
Before you send anything
For local Bulgarian acquiring, yes — the acquirer contracts with a Bulgarian entity. For most international merchant accounts and for all of the integration work, no. If you already have a company somewhere else and it is working, we would rather integrate what you have than sell you a second one.
No, and nobody can. The acquirer decides. What we can do is stop the avoidable refusals — wrong category, unevidenced forecast, a website that fails review — and place the file where the category is actually accepted. If we think an application will not succeed as things stand, we will say so before you pay rather than after.
The merchant category code, which reflects chargeback likelihood, refund patterns and regulatory exposure rather than legality. Supplements, travel, subscriptions, gaming, adult, forex and crypto-adjacent categories are the usual ones. Being high risk is not a problem to hide — it is a set of terms to negotiate.
Preparation is usually one to two weeks depending on how quickly documents come back. The acquirer’s own review runs from a few days to several weeks, and longer for high-risk categories. The single biggest delay is a file that goes in incomplete and comes back with questions.
It is the share of your revenue the acquirer holds back against future chargebacks, typically 5–10%, released after 90 to 180 days. It is negotiable at placement and very hard to change afterwards, which is why it belongs in the conversation before you sign rather than in the first statement.
For domestic and EEA card traffic, materially so — it starts near 0.79% against 2.9–7% at international high-risk providers. It is not cheaper for every profile, and it is not available to every category. On genuine volume the difference is usually worth the placement fee several times over in the first year.
Usually. Tell us what is connected, what fails, and whether you have access to the acquirer’s dashboard and the codebase. Half of the work we take on is finishing or repairing an integration rather than starting one, and that is a normal thing to ask for.
Yes, and with the other major processors, but we are not anyone’s reseller. If Stripe suits your category and volume we will say so. If your category is one Stripe eventually closes, we will say that instead — because an account that works for four months is worse than one that never opened.
The product or service, the countries you sell to, expected monthly volume, average order value, and the website if there is one. That is enough to name the likely category, the realistic acquirers and the rate band. Everything else follows from those five answers.
Then buy one part. The engagements are priced separately because most people need one or two of them, not all. Anyone quoting a single bundled figure for “payments” is either padding it or has not worked out what you actually need.
The product, the countries, the volume, the average order value. We will tell you the likely merchant category, which acquirers realistically accept it, what rate band to expect, whether the website will pass review as it stands — and which of the fixed prices above applies to you.
