How Much Does Relay Cost in 2026? Real Ecommerce TCO

If you have ever priced out a business bank account for a DTC brand, you already know the headline number rarely matches the bill. Relay (a business banking platform built around the Profit First multi-account method, popular with ecommerce operators) advertises a $0/month starting price. That is real. It is also the least useful number on the page, because the actual cost of running a brand on Relay is set by three things the pricing page buries: how many wires you send, how much same-day ACH you use, and how much revenue you collect through Pay-by-Bank invoices.

This page lays out all three Relay tiers (Starter, Grow, and Scale), the full fee schedule for each, and the real total cost of ownership for a brand doing $1M to $5M in revenue. The short version: at low volume, Starter's $0 subscription genuinely is the cheapest option. But the moment you start wiring suppliers and collecting invoices at any volume, the math flips, and the plan with the highest subscription often ends up being the cheapest plan overall. Below we show exactly where that crossover sits.

Relay's three plans: what you are actually buying

Relay sells three tiers, and the pricing is cleanly stepped: Starter at $0/month, Grow at $30/month, and Scale at $90/month. One thing to flag up front, because it matters for every number on this page: the $90 Scale price is promotional. The list price is $120/month, so check which one is in effect when you sign up. Annualized, that is $0, $360, and $1,080 (or $1,440 at the Scale list price).

The trap with a $0 headline is that operators read it two ways, and both are wrong. Some dismiss Relay as a free tool that must be missing features; others budget it as a genuine zero. "Free" on Starter means no monthly subscription and no minimum balance, not zero variable cost. You still pay per wire, per same-day ACH, and a percentage on every Pay-by-Bank invoice you collect.

When I talk to founders running a brand in the $1M to $5M range, the most common version of this mistake is picking Starter because it is free, then quietly paying more in per-transaction fees every month than the Grow subscription would have cost to eliminate them. The honest way to price Relay is to ignore the subscription line for a second, model your actual monthly transaction profile, and only then add the subscription back. The tier is the answer, not the sticker.

What climbs as you move up is a mix of fee discounts and balance perks: cheaper wires, cheaper same-day ACH, a lower Pay-by-Bank percentage, higher savings APY, more credit card cash back, and more checking accounts (up to 20 on Starter and Grow, 50 on Scale). The next section lays out every one line by line.

The fee schedule that actually matters for ecommerce

Here is the part most people came for: the full fee schedule by tier, so you can find the lines that apply to your brand and read across. The four variable costs that move a DTC operator's bill are outgoing wires, same-day ACH, the Pay-by-Bank invoice percentage, and card payment processing. Everything else is mostly free, which is the genuinely good news buried in Relay's pricing.

Two lines do most of the work for an ecommerce brand. The first is the outgoing domestic wire, which drops from $8 to $5 the moment you move to Grow. The second, and bigger, is the Pay-by-Bank percentage: if you invoice customers or wholesale accounts and collect by pulling from their bank, that 1.00% to 0.50% spread compounds fast at volume. The next section turns this schedule into an actual monthly bill.

What a typical DTC brand actually pays per month

List fees are abstract until you plug in real volume, so let's model a representative $2.5M DTC brand. Say it sends 10 domestic supplier wires a month, runs 5 same-day ACH transfers, sends 2 international local-network wires, and collects $50,000 in Pay-by-Bank invoices at an average of $1,000 per payment (so 50 invoices). That is a normal profile for a brand buying inventory overseas and doing some wholesale or B2B collection.

Here is what that brand pays on each plan, broken into subscription, wire-and-ACH fees, and Pay-by-Bank fees.

The result is the whole point of this article: at a typical DTC profile, the plan with the highest subscription is the cheapest plan overall. Scale costs $393 all-in, $83 less than Grow and $222 less than Starter, even though its subscription is the most expensive of the three. The lower per-transaction fees more than pay for the higher monthly fee.

Walk the Pay-by-Bank line, the biggest single driver. At $1,000 per invoice, Starter's 1.00% is $10 per payment (it hits the cap exactly), so 50 invoices is $500. Grow's 0.75% is $7.50 each, or $375. Scale's 0.50% is $5.00 each, or $250. That one line swings $250/month between Starter and Scale, which on its own dwarfs the $90 subscription difference. The pattern we see again and again is that operators obsess over the subscription number and never model the percentage line, which is the one that actually moves the bill.

When does upgrading pay for itself?

The crossover is more aggressive than most people expect, and it comes from two independent angles: per-transaction fees and savings interest. You only need one of them to justify the upgrade.

On fees, the cleanest example is wires. Grow saves $3 per domestic wire versus Starter ($5 instead of $8). Send 10 a month and that is $30 saved, which is exactly the Grow subscription. So if you send 10 or more domestic wires a month, Grow is free before you count a single other benefit. Layer in the Pay-by-Bank discount (0.75% versus 1.00%) and the same-day ACH discount ($3 versus $5), and any brand with real supplier and invoicing activity is net cheaper on Grow than Starter.

The second angle is interest, and this one surprises operators who keep meaningful cash on hand. The question is: how big does your average savings balance need to be before the extra APY alone covers the subscription?

So on interest alone, Grow and Scale both break even around a $57K average savings balance (at Scale's promo price), and Scale's list price needs about $76K. A brand sitting on $150K earns roughly $2,835 more per year on Scale's 3.00% APY than on Starter's 1.11%, well above even the $1,440 list-price subscription. When I talk to operators who run a disciplined Profit First system and actually hold a tax-and-profit reserve, the interest math usually justifies the upgrade by itself, before a single fee saving. Most real brands clear the bar on fees or interest, and many clear it on both.

When does Scale make sense, and when it doesn't?

Scale is the right plan for a specific brand, and overkill for another. The extra $60/month over Grow (on promo pricing) buys 10 free same-day ACH transfers, the lowest Pay-by-Bank rate (0.50%), 3.00% APY, 1.5% credit card cash back, and up to 50 checking accounts.

Scale earns its price for brands above roughly $3M in revenue that hit one of three profiles: they keep a meaningful cash balance ($50K or more, where the APY gap pays for the plan), they collect significant Pay-by-Bank invoice volume, or they run a lot of supplier wires and same-day ACH. Cash back is a quieter lever worth modeling: a brand putting $30K/month on the Relay credit card earns 1.5% on Scale ($450) versus 1.0% on Starter ($300), a $150/month difference that alone covers the Starter-to-Scale gap on promo pricing.

Who should stay on Grow? Lower-volume brands where Scale's subscription is not offset by any of those levers. If you hold little cash, do not invoice through Pay-by-Bank, and send only a handful of wires, the jump to Scale is paying $60/month for headroom you are not using. For a lot of $1M to $3M brands, Grow is the sweet spot, and Scale becomes obviously correct once balances and B2B collections grow into it.

For operators thinking about where banking fits in the broader finance stack, this is the same logic that governs tooling decisions like how much A2X costs or how much 8fig costs: price the thing against the value it actually delivers at your stage, not against the cheapest sticker.

What Relay doesn't cost: the zero-fee list

The "hidden fees" question is the most common one people type into a search bar before signing up, so here is the direct answer: there are fewer than you would expect, and the surprises mostly run in your favor. Relay charges no overdraft fee, no minimum balance fee, no excess transaction fee, and no foreign transaction fee on the Visa debit card. Standard ACH is free on every tier, and incoming standard wires are free too.

The costs that do exist are worth naming so they don't surprise you. Cash deposits through a Green Dot retailer cost $4.95 each (Allpoint ATM deposits are free), so route cash accordingly. And one distinction from the fine print: while incoming standard wires are free, an incoming wire collected through Relay's payment-request flow carries a $5 fee, so the "free incoming wire" rule applies to direct wires, not invoice-driven ones.

When I talk to founders nervous about getting nickel-and-dimed by a business bank, this is the section that relaxes them. The structural fees that quietly drain accounts at legacy banks (overdraft, minimums, foreign transaction surcharges) are simply not here. Your real Relay cost is the subscription plus the handful of transaction lines modeled above, and almost nothing else.

Relay vs Mercury vs Bluevine: fee comparison for ecommerce

Relay is not the only business banking option a DTC brand considers, and the right answer depends on what you optimize for. The short version: Relay optimizes for the Profit First multi-account operator, Mercury for yield and VC-backed treasury, and Bluevine for credit access alongside banking. Here are the ecommerce-relevant lines side by side.

The honest read: if your single biggest cost is outgoing domestic wires and you do not invoice through Pay-by-Bank, Mercury's $0 wire fee is genuinely cheaper on that one line. If you park large idle balances, Mercury's treasury yield can edge out Relay's APY. But if you run cash by allocation (the Profit First system Relay is built around), collect invoices via Pay-by-Bank, and want tiered fee savings as you scale, Relay's account structure is usually the deciding factor more than any single fee. The number that should drive the decision is not the headline subscription; it is your real transaction profile crossed with how you actually manage cash.

The mistake is reading the $0 sticker and either dismissing Relay as a free toy or budgeting it as a true zero. Neither is right. For a real $2.5M DTC brand sending supplier wires and collecting Pay-by-Bank invoices, Scale at $90/month is often the cheapest plan all-in at about $393/month, because the lower per-transaction fees outweigh the higher subscription. Model your transaction profile, not the headline. The tier is the answer; the sticker is a decoy.

Sources and methodology

The tier pricing and fee schedule come directly from Relay's own pricing page and Subscription Plans Overview support article, fetched in June 2026. Those sources set the subscription prices ($0 Starter, $30 Grow, $90 Scale promotional against a $120 list), the wire fees ($8/$5/$5 domestic; $5/$3/$1.50 international local network; $25/$22/$20 SWIFT), and the same-day ACH fees ($5/$3/10-free-then-$1). Several Relay support URLs returned a 403 on direct fetch and were triangulated through independent research engines that cite the same URLs verbatim, then cross-checked against third-party reviews.

The Pay-by-Bank fees (1.00%/0.75%/0.50%, each capped at $10) come from Relay's Invoices and Payment Request Processing Fees article, with card processing held at 2.9% + $0.30 across all tiers. One data note: some third-party sources show a single blended rate rather than the tiered schedule, and an older Starter spec cited 0.75%. We used the tiered figures from Relay's own support article as authoritative. Verify the live rate against your account, since this is the line that most moves the total.

The monthly TCO model applies that schedule to a representative $2.5M DTC profile: 10 domestic wires, 5 same-day ACH transfers, 2 international local-network wires, and $50,000 in Pay-by-Bank collections at $1,000 average per invoice (50 invoices). The wire-and-ACH line works out to $115 on Starter (10 x $8 + 5 x $5 + 2 x $5), $71 on Grow (10 x $5 + 5 x $3 + 2 x $3), and $53 on Scale (10 x $5 + 0 same-day under the 10 free + 2 x $1.50). The Pay-by-Bank line is $500 / $375 / $250 because each $1,000 invoice incurs $10 / $7.50 / $5.00. Treat the $615 / $476 / $393 totals as directional for that volume, not a universal answer.

The APY break-even table divides each plan's annual subscription by its incremental APY over Starter (Grow +0.64 pp, Scale +1.89 pp), giving roughly $56,250 for Grow, $57,143 for Scale at the promo price, and $76,190 at the Scale list price. APY rates are variable and quoted as of June 2026; re-check before relying on the interest math.

A few caveats. The Scale subscription is promotional ($90 versus a $120 list price), so confirm which applies when you sign up. The Mercury and Bluevine comparison reflects published 2026 schedules that may have shifted, particularly Mercury's wire pricing. And Relay does not publish ecommerce-specific pricing: every figure here is a general small-business rate applied to DTC scenarios. If banking is one decision inside a larger finance-stack build, our interim and fractional CFO services page covers how we help operators choose the tools that actually earn their place.

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