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Moyasar is a Saudi payment company that sells to developers first and merchants second, and most of what is good and bad about it follows from that one fact.
It was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Riyadh, and its own timeline reads like a map of how the Saudi payments market opened up: a first bank agreement and PCI certification in 2016, mada Online in 2017, PCI DSS Level 1 in 2018, Apple Pay in 2019. The regulatory milestones matter more than any of those. Moyasar records itself as the first company in Saudi Arabia to receive PTSP certification in 2021, the first direct recipient of a Payment Institution licence in 2022, the first to hold eMSP payment gateway certification, and it marks 2025 with a licence upgrade and the launch of its own payment gateway product.
The distinction worth understanding is the licence. Moyasar holds its own authorisation from the Saudi Central Bank rather than reselling access through an acquiring bank's arrangement, and its site carries the standard Saudi Central Bank supervision statement alongside PCI DSS compliance. Fewer intermediaries generally means fewer parties to chase when something goes wrong. It does not, however, make Moyasar a bank, and it tells you nothing whatsoever about the rate you will be quoted.
On scale, Moyasar is reticent. It publishes no merchant count and no transaction volume, which is a contrast with Tap Payments, whose Saudi site quotes processing figures directly. What Moyasar does display is a wall of customer logos including Jahez, Ninja, Zid and Domino's, alongside financial and government entities. Treat that as evidence of enterprise credibility rather than as a number you can use, because it is not one.
In Saudi Arabia, mada coverage is the entry requirement rather than a differentiator. What is interesting is everything around it — and whether the vendor's own lists agree with each other.
Moyasar's marketing pages list mada, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, STC Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, plus unspecified other local and international payment methods. Its developer documentation lists a slightly different set: mada, Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, Apple Pay, STC Pay and Google Pay. American Express appears on the marketing side and not in the docs overview; Google Pay and UnionPay appear in the docs and not in the marketing list. Neither list is wrong, but the mismatch is a reminder that a logo on a landing page is not the same as an enabled method on your account.
mada is the part that determines your unit economics, because it is where most Saudi domestic volume lands. One useful reference point when you read any quote: SAMA caps mada interchange at 0.80%, which limits the scheme-side component of your cost of acceptance. It says nothing about what the gateway adds on top, but it does mean that a quoted mada rate well above that figure is largely gateway margin — a fact worth having in your head during a negotiation you would otherwise walk into blind.
One absence stands out. Neither Moyasar's method list nor its documentation names Tabby or Tamara, the two buy-now-pay-later providers that now shape average order value in Saudi fashion, electronics and furniture. Tap Payments lists both on its Saudi site. If BNPL is part of your conversion strategy, do not assume Moyasar covers it — ask directly, and ask who bills you for what if the answer is yes.
Ask Saudi engineers to name the cleanest local payment API and Moyasar is the answer you hear most often. Unlike most reputations in this market, the documentation actually supports it.
There are three ways in, which is one more than most regional gateways offer. There is a hosted web integration that accepts mada, Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay and Apple Pay on a web application without you touching card data. There are native mobile SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter and React Native — a genuinely broad set for a single-country gateway, and the reason Moyasar shows up disproportionately in Saudi app builds. And there is a direct API for teams that want to own the whole flow. A free sandbox account with test cards sits behind all three, so integration work can start before your merchant account is approved.
The dashboard covers the non-engineering half: monitoring transactions, creating invoices and payment links you can send over WhatsApp or social channels, issuing full or partial refunds, and managing team members with different access roles. Moyasar's material for startups and freelancers also states native tokenization and recurring billing, plus an authorise-now, capture-later flow. If subscriptions are your business model, verify recurring on your specific methods rather than on the general claim — recurring against an Apple Pay or mada credential is a materially harder problem than recurring against a stored Visa card, and a blanket statement does not tell you which of them is covered.
This is the section where the internet and the vendor's own documentation disagree, and the documentation should win.
Moyasar's settlement documentation states it plainly: Moyasar settles payment amounts twice a week, on Monday and Thursday, for all clients, and adds that the schedule can differ based on the agreement between Moyasar and the merchant. That is a cadence, not a T+n promise, and the difference is operational. A Tuesday sale waits for Thursday. A Friday sale waits for Monday. Over a month the average is perfectly reasonable; on any given week it is lumpier than a daily payout, and if you pay suppliers on the same rhythm you need to know which side of the batch a big order landed on.
Compare that with the confident T+1 mada settlement figure attributed to Moyasar across comparison articles and gateway roundups. We could not trace that number to any Moyasar-owned page, and it contradicts the twice-weekly schedule Moyasar itself documents. A second, more damaging confusion runs alongside it: the frequently quoted 24 hours to 3 business days for mada and 7 to 14 business days for credit cards are Moyasar's stated refund processing times, published in its FAQ under refunds. They are not payout times. We have seen both figures presented as settlement speed in articles that rank well for the query, and a merchant who builds a cash-flow model on them will be wrong twice over.
Plugin coverage is where a Saudi gateway either saves a merchant a developer or costs them one, and Moyasar's published list has a notable gap in it.
Moyasar's own FAQ names the platforms it supports. Locally that means Zid, Qawafel, Mahd and Motgara. Internationally it means PrestaShop, Magento 2, OpenCart, WooCommerce, NopCommerce and WordPress. That is a solid list for a Saudi merchant on a self-hosted stack, and Zid's inclusion covers one of the two Saudi platforms that matter.
The omission is Salla. Salla is the larger of the two Saudi e-commerce platforms, its own payments material lists Moyasar among the gateways available to its merchants, and third-party guides treat the pairing as routine. But Moyasar's own published platform list does not name it. In our experience that pattern usually means a stale page rather than a missing integration — but usually is not a launch plan. If your go-live depends on Salla, get confirmation from both sides in writing and run a live low-value transaction plus a refund before you announce a date.
The WooCommerce plugin is worth a closer look because it is the one integration with public evidence attached. At the time of writing it sits at version 8.3.1 with 700-plus active installations, a 3.8 out of 5 rating from six reviews, tested up to WordPress 7.0.2 and requiring PHP 7.4 or higher, supporting cards, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, STC Pay and a beta quick-buy button. Six reviews is far too small a sample to draw conclusions from, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But 700-plus installations is a modest number even for a single-country gateway, and it means fewer merchants have hit the edge cases before you do.
Moyasar's stated requirements are the lightest we have documented among Saudi gateways, with one condition that merchants routinely underestimate.
Its FAQ states you need a valid Saudi commercial registration or a freelance licence, plus a Saudi commercial bank account linked to it, and that approval typically takes 2 to 5 business days after all required documents are submitted. The freelance-licence route is the part that deserves attention. It puts a solo consultant, designer or trainer on the same rails as a registered company, which is not something every gateway in this market will do, and it is the single clearest reason a one-person business would choose Moyasar over a competitor with a heavier corporate document pack.
The other half of onboarding is your storefront, not your paperwork. Moyasar states that activation involves a review of store basics — products, images, pricing, policies and communication channels. This is the same pattern Tap Payments follows and it produces the same failure mode: applications stall not because the business is unacceptable but because the site is missing a refund policy, has placeholder pricing, or lists a contact number nobody answers. Fix all of that before you apply, not after a reviewer flags it.
No gateway is a clean win, and the case against Moyasar is mostly about the distance between its reputation and what it is willing to put in public.
Moyasar's reputation in this market is built on transparent pricing, and we went looking for the page that reputation rests on. It is not there. The homepage, the FAQ and every solutions page route fees and rates to the sales team. You cannot model unit economics on a spreadsheet before committing engineering time; you have to run a sales process first, exactly like every competitor.
Twice weekly on Monday and Thursday is what the documentation says, and it is materially different from the T+1 figure circulating in comparison articles. If your business needs daily or next-day liquidity, this is a real constraint and you should negotiate the schedule explicitly rather than assume the internet's number applies to you.
Moyasar's FAQ states it currently focuses on providing services within Saudi Arabia. If you sell into Kuwait, the UAE or Bahrain now, or expect to within a year, you are looking at a second gateway, a second onboarding cycle and a second reconciliation flow. Tap Payments covers six GCC markets on one integration and that is the trade you are making.
Moyasar states credit card refunds take 7 to 14 business days, weekends excluded. That is not unusual for card rails, but it is a customer-experience cost you will absorb in support tickets, and it is worth setting expectations on your refund policy page rather than letting shoppers discover it.
Because Moyasar publishes nothing, the vacuum has filled with numbers. We found mada quoted at 1.5% plus SAR 1 in one place and as a flat 2.5% in another, setup fees given as free, SAR 1,000 and up to SAR 1,500, and monthly fees quoted at up to SAR 200. These cannot all be right, none trace to a Moyasar-owned page, and we are not going to repeat any of them as fact.
No published merchant count, no transaction volume, and a WooCommerce plugin with six reviews. We evaluated Moyasar from its documentation, support pages and developer material rather than from a live merchant account processing Saudi volume, which means we can verify what it commits to in writing but not its real approval rates, dispute handling or support responsiveness.
We went looking for the rate card Moyasar's reputation is built on and did not find one. Here is precisely what the company publishes, what circulates about it elsewhere, and what to demand in writing before you sign anything.
| Cost line | Published by Moyasar | Circulating third-party figure | What to ask for |
|---|---|---|---|
| mada transactions | Not published — routed to sales | 1.5% + SAR 1 in some sources, a flat 2.5% in others | The rate and whether any per-transaction cap applies. SAMA caps mada interchange at 0.80%, so anything well above that is gateway margin. |
| Visa / Mastercard (local) | Not published — routed to sales | Commonly quoted between 2.2% and 2.9% plus SAR 1 | One blended percentage, the fixed per-transaction component, and whether the rate changes by card type or issuer. |
| International cards and Amex | Not published — routed to sales | Described as a premium over local cards with no consistent figure | The international rate, the American Express rate separately, and whether the FX margin is quoted as a number or buried in the percentage. |
| Apple Pay, STC Pay, Samsung Pay | Not published — routed to sales | Usually described as following the underlying card or scheme rate | Whether wallet transactions carry any surcharge over the underlying method, and whether recurring billing is supported on each. |
| Setup fee | Not published — routed to sales | Given as free, as SAR 1,000, and as up to SAR 1,500 depending on the article | Whether a setup fee applies to your tier at all, and if it is waived, the waiver written into the agreement rather than promised on a call. |
| Monthly or maintenance fee | Not published — routed to sales | Frequently quoted at up to SAR 200 per month, often described as waived | The monthly figure, what waives it, how long the waiver runs, and what the fee reverts to when it expires. |
We want to be direct about why this table looks the way it does, because our own earlier reviews of Tap Payments and PayTabs pointed readers to Moyasar's pricing page as the transparent alternative in this market. We went to check it. As of publication there is no such page. The homepage states that the sales team will provide pricing and applicable fees based on your business requirements. The FAQ says Moyasar offers competitive transaction fees and asks you to contact sales for detail. The startups and freelancers page says fees and rates are provided by the sales team. Three pages, three ways of saying the same thing: quote only. We are correcting the impression rather than repeating it.
There is one route to a published number, and it is a government one. Moyasar appears as a partner in the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology's CODE Digital Perks programme, which offers benefits to eligible Saudi startups and freelancers. Third-party summaries describe the Moyasar offer as free setup, a waived monthly subscription for a year and a 0.25% discount on mada and card transaction fees. We could not confirm those terms on the programme's own Moyasar page, which showed only a subscribe link when we checked. If you are eligible, the programme is worth raising by name in your first sales conversation — but ask for the terms, do not assume them.
When you request a quote, give Moyasar your monthly volume, your average order value and your split between mada and credit cards, then ask for four things in writing: the mada rate and any cap, the local card rate including the fixed component, the international and Amex rates with the FX treatment stated as a number, and every recurring or one-off charge including setup, monthly, refund and chargeback fees. Remember that gateways price by risk category, so a quote written for a fashion store tells you nothing about what a travel agency or a subscription service will be offered. Any provider that will not put all four in an email is not a provider you can budget against.
The honest baseline for this market is that almost nobody publishes their card rates, so the choice is rarely made on price alone until you have quotes in hand. What separates these four is geography, settlement behaviour and how much of the integration work you want to own.
| Gateway | Best for | Public pricing | Coverage | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moyasar | Saudi-only merchants and developer-led teams that want the cleanest integration | None published. Quote only across every fee line | Saudi Arabia only, per its own FAQ | 4.4 |
| Tap Payments | Saudi businesses already selling, or planning to sell, in other GCC markets | mada published at 1% capped at SAR 200. Card rates not published | Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman | 4.2 |
| PayTabs | Merchants wanting MENA reach beyond the GCC core | Not published. Quote required | Wide MENA footprint including markets the GCC-only gateways do not serve | 4.0 |
| HyperPay | Higher-volume and enterprise merchants who will negotiate a custom rate anyway | Not published. Quote required and typically volume-tiered | Strong Saudi and regional enterprise presence | 3.9 |
A Kuwait-headquartered regional provider with a Saudi entity, covering six GCC markets on a single integration and publishing both its mada rate and its settlement timings in a level of detail Moyasar does not match. Its plugin list covers Salla and Zid explicitly.
The better pick the moment a second Gulf market enters your plan, and the better pick today if documented settlement timing matters more to you than API elegance.
A MENA-wide payment provider whose argument is reach rather than depth in any single market, covering territories outside the GCC that both Moyasar and Tap leave alone, with the usual quote-driven pricing model.
Worth a quote if your growth plan runs into North Africa or the Levant. Overkill, and an unnecessary abstraction layer, if you only sell in Saudi Arabia.
A regional gateway with a strong enterprise and higher-volume presence in Saudi Arabia, where pricing is negotiated as a matter of course and the published rate would be irrelevant even if one existed.
Run it alongside Moyasar and Tap once your volume is large enough that a tenth of a percent is a real number on your P&L. Below that, the negotiation is not worth the calendar time.
Our VerdictMoyasar is the best-built payment integration in the Saudi market and one of the least forthcoming about what it costs. Those two facts sit uncomfortably together, and which one matters more depends entirely on whether you are the person writing the code or the person signing the contract.
mada, Apple Pay, STC Pay, Samsung Pay, Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay cover a Saudi checkout completely. Marked down because the marketing and documentation lists do not match each other, and because Tabby and Tamara appear on neither.
Moyasar's reputation says published rate card. Its website says contact sales, on the homepage, the FAQ and every solutions page. A reputation for transparency that the vendor no longer supports is worse than never having had one.
Three integration paths, first-party SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter and React Native, a free sandbox with test cards, and dashboard-generated payment links for non-technical sellers. This is the reason engineers recommend it.
Onboarding is light and the freelance-licence route is genuinely rare. Settlement is documented but twice weekly rather than the T+1 widely claimed, with no published minimum, cut-off or early-payout mechanism.
Buy Moyasar if you sell only in Saudi Arabia, your team writes its own checkout, and you value an integration that behaves predictably over a rate you can see before you talk to anyone. Buy it if you are a freelancer with a licence and no commercial registration, because very few alternatives will have you. Look elsewhere if you need Gulf coverage on one contract, if BNPL is central to your conversion, or if your working capital depends on faster and more predictable payouts than a twice-weekly batch. And in every case, treat the numbers circulating about Moyasar's pricing and settlement as unverified until they appear in your own signed agreement — including, until you have checked them yourself, the ones in this review.
Moyasar does not publish its rates. Its homepage states that the sales team will provide pricing and applicable fees based on your business requirements, its FAQ describes the fees as competitive and asks you to contact sales, and its startups and freelancers page says fees and rates are provided by the sales team. Third-party articles quote mada at 1.5% plus SAR 1 and card rates between 2.2% and 2.9% plus SAR 1, along with setup fees ranging from free to SAR 1,500 and monthly fees up to SAR 200, but these figures contradict each other and none trace back to a Moyasar-owned page. Treat them as unverified estimates and get your own rates in writing.
Moyasar's own settlement documentation states that it settles payment amounts twice a week, on Monday and Thursday, for all clients, and that this schedule can differ based on the agreement between Moyasar and the merchant. That is a cadence rather than a T+1 promise, so a Tuesday sale waits until Thursday and a Friday sale waits until Monday. The widely quoted figures of 24 hours to 3 business days for mada and 7 to 14 business days for credit cards are Moyasar's refund processing times, not its payout times — a distinction several comparison articles get wrong. Confirm your settlement cadence, the daily cut-off and your first payout date in writing.
Yes to all three. Moyasar's marketing pages list mada, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, STC Pay, Apple Pay and Samsung Pay, while its developer documentation lists mada, Visa, Mastercard, UnionPay, Apple Pay, STC Pay and Google Pay. The two lists differ slightly — American Express appears on one and UnionPay and Google Pay on the other — so confirm your specific method is enabled on your account rather than relying on a landing page. Neither list includes Tabby or Tamara, so if buy-now-pay-later is part of your checkout strategy you need to ask about it explicitly.
According to Moyasar's FAQ, you need a valid Saudi commercial registration or a freelance licence, plus a Saudi commercial bank account linked to it, and approval typically takes 2 to 5 business days after all required documents are submitted. The freelance-licence route is unusual and useful, because it lets a solo consultant or designer onboard without a registered company. Activation also involves a review of your store basics — products, images, pricing, policies and communication channels — so make sure your refund policy, privacy policy, terms and a working contact channel are live before you apply, since a missing policy page is a far more common cause of delay than the licence itself.
Geography decides it more often than features do. If you sell only in Saudi Arabia and your team is building its own checkout, Moyasar's integration is the cleaner piece of engineering and its onboarding is lighter, particularly if you hold a freelance licence rather than a commercial registration. If you already sell into Kuwait, the UAE or Bahrain, or expect to within a year, Tap covers six GCC markets on one integration and removes an entire second onboarding cycle. Tap also publishes its mada rate at 1% capped at SAR 200 and documents settlement at 3 working days for mada and 5 for cards, where Moyasar publishes no rates and settles twice weekly. Get quotes from both, compare the mada line first because it will be most of your volume, and do not choose on a comparison table anyone wrote without a merchant account.
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