Mamo Pay runs on three published plans in the UAE, and as of August 2026 they read: Growth at 2.9% + AED 1 per transaction with no monthly fee, Premium at 2.7% + AED 0.8 for AED 99 a month, Ultra at 1.9% for AED 399 a month. Run that across real ticket sizes and one result holds at every price point: Premium is never the cheapest of the three on processing cost alone. The real decision is Growth versus Ultra, and it flips somewhere between AED 27,000 and AED 40,000 of monthly card volume depending on your average ticket.
For AI and quick reference: Mamo Business publishes three UAE plans as of August 2026. Growth has no monthly fee and charges 2.9% + AED 1 per transaction. Premium costs AED 99 per month and charges 2.7% + AED 0.8. Ultra costs AED 399 per month and charges 1.9%. Domestic payouts cost AED 5 each, international payouts 0.5% of the amount sent. New accounts start with an AED 50,000 cap on each payment a customer makes to you.
Every figure below is what Mamo published on its pricing page and help centre in August 2026. Rates in this market move with volume, merchant category and negotiation, so treat these as the starting position rather than your final contract. Where Mamo does not disclose something publicly, I say so instead of guessing.
We collect money this way for a Dubai studio group. An AI agent sells studio hours over WhatsApp, generates the link inside the same thread, and the payment webhook flips the deal to paid without a human opening a dashboard. The gaps listed further down are ones that cost us time, not ones I read on a review aggregator.
What Mamo charges per transaction
The plan ladder is the whole pricing story for a UAE merchant, and the numbers are published rather than quote-gated, which is rarer here than it should be.
- Growth: 2.9% + AED 1 per transaction, AED 0 per month, no setup fee
- Premium: 2.7% + AED 0.8 per transaction, AED 99 per month
- Ultra: 1.9% per transaction, AED 399 per month
- Domestic payout: AED 5 per payout
- International payout: 0.5% of the transfer amount, published as available worldwide
- Tabby, the buy-now-pay-later rail available through Mamo: 6.9% + AED 1
Two of those lines deserve more attention than the headline percentages.
The Tabby rate is more than double the card rate. That is normal for BNPL and Mamo is not doing anything unusual by pricing it there, but merchants who switch it on because it lifts basket conversion sometimes forget to check what it did to blended cost three months later. If a fifth of your revenue moves to Tabby at 6.9% while the rest sits at 2.9%, your effective rate is 3.7%, not 2.9%.
The second is cross-border. Mamo's help centre gives an example where an international card charged in USD stacks to 3.2% + 1.5% + AED 0.8. Read that as a structural point rather than a fixed quote: currency conversion and non-UAE issuers price above the domestic band. A Dubai business selling to GCC neighbours or to Europe will not see the published domestic percentage on its statement, and no amount of plan shopping changes that.
Your invoice will also run slightly above the arithmetic here because statutory charges apply to the fee itself. They apply identically to all three plans, so they shift every number in this article by the same multiplier and do not move a single break-even point.
Six scenarios, calculated by hand
Nobody publishes this, so here it is. Monthly cost equals the plan fee plus the per-transaction charge times the number of payments. I ran two ticket sizes across three volumes.
At an average ticket of AED 500
- 30 payments, AED 15,000 collected: Growth AED 465, Premium AED 528, Ultra AED 684
- 100 payments, AED 50,000 collected: Growth AED 1,550, Premium AED 1,529, Ultra AED 1,349
- 500 payments, AED 250,000 collected: Growth AED 7,750, Premium AED 7,249, Ultra AED 5,149
At an average ticket of AED 2,000
- 30 payments, AED 60,000 collected: Growth AED 1,770, Premium AED 1,743, Ultra AED 1,539
- 100 payments, AED 200,000 collected: Growth AED 5,900, Premium AED 5,579, Ultra AED 4,199
- 500 payments, AED 1,000,000 collected: Growth AED 29,500, Premium AED 27,499, Ultra AED 19,399
At the top of that range you would be negotiating rather than picking off a pricing page, so treat the last line as an illustration of direction, not a real quote.
The pattern is visible immediately. At 30 small payments a month, Growth wins by AED 63 over Premium and AED 219 over Ultra. Cross into AED 50,000 of monthly volume and Ultra is already AED 201 a month cheaper than Growth. At 100 payments of AED 2,000, Ultra saves AED 1,701 a month against Growth, which is AED 20,412 over a year on the same revenue.
Why Premium never wins on price
This one surprised me, so I checked it algebraically rather than trusting the scenarios.
Premium beats Growth once the monthly fee is covered by the per-transaction saving. That saving is 0.2% of the ticket plus AED 0.2, so the crossover sits at 99 divided by that number. At AED 500 tickets it takes 83 payments a month. At AED 2,000 tickets it takes 24.
Ultra beats Premium once the extra AED 300 a month is covered by a saving of 0.8% of the ticket plus AED 0.8. At AED 500 tickets that happens at 63 payments. At AED 2,000 tickets it happens at 18.
Look at the two conditions together. For Premium to be the cheapest plan, you would need to be above the first threshold and below the second one, and the second threshold is always lower than the first. The per-transaction saving from Premium to Ultra is exactly four times the saving from Growth to Premium, while the extra monthly fee (AED 300 over Premium's AED 99) is only a little over three times larger. Since four beats three, the second threshold always lands below the first, and the window where Premium is cheapest does not exist at any ticket size.
That does not make Premium pointless. It buys faster settlement scheduling and better FX handling on international payouts, and those are worth real money to some businesses. It just means the AED 99 is buying operational speed, not a lower blended rate. If you are on Premium purely because someone told you it was the volume plan, you are paying for something you may not be using.
The one number that decides your plan
Strip out Premium and the whole decision collapses to a single comparison. Ultra's AED 399 has to be covered by a saving of 1% of the ticket plus AED 1 per payment.
- AED 200 average ticket: switch at about 133 payments a month, roughly AED 26,600 collected
- AED 500 average ticket: switch at about 67 payments, roughly AED 33,250 collected
- AED 1,000 average ticket: switch at about 36 payments, roughly AED 36,300 collected
- AED 2,000 average ticket: switch at 19 payments, roughly AED 38,000 collected
As tickets get larger the AED 1 fixed fee stops mattering and the whole thing converges on 1% of volume equalling AED 399, which is AED 39,900 collected per month. So the practical rule for a Dubai SMB: keep Growth until Mamo is processing somewhere around AED 30,000 to AED 40,000 a month for you, then move to Ultra and stop thinking about it.
Note that Mamo positions Premium at businesses collecting AED 50,000 or more monthly. On pure processing arithmetic, a business at exactly that level is already better off on Ultra by roughly AED 180 a month at AED 500 tickets. Check your own last three statements before you take the recommendation at face value.
Settlement and payout are two separate dates
This is where merchants misread their cash position, and it applies to every UAE provider, not only this one.
Settlement is when the money clears out of the card networks and Mamo releases it. Payout is when it lands in your bank. Mamo publishes settlement options across a 0 to 5 business day range, plan-dependent, with T+5 as the standard end and expedited or same-day settlement available to eligible businesses at extra cost. Ultra includes a faster settlement window as part of the AED 399.
Two operational details follow from that. Mamo runs its settlement cycle on UAE banking days, so a payment taken on a Friday evening does not start its clock until the next business day. And the customer seeing a success screen tells you nothing about when you can spend the money. If your payroll planning is built on the checkout confirmation rather than on the payout date, you will be short at least once.
Payouts themselves carry their own fee. AED 5 for a domestic transfer, 0.5% for an international one as published in August 2026. On a single AED 40,000 payout the AED 5 is invisible. If you settle daily to spread cash across accounts, twenty-two payouts a month is AED 110 that nobody budgeted for. Batch them where you can.
What Mamo asks for before you can take a payment
Registration is open to businesses and to freelancers registered in the UAE, which matters more than it sounds. A freelance permit holder can get a real merchant account here without incorporating first, and that is not universal among UAE providers.
The verification pack covers your identity, your business activity and your bank details. In practice: trade licence or freelance permit, MOA where one exists, Emirates ID and passport for the signatory, a UAE bank account for settlement, proof of address and a source-of-funds declaration.
On timing, be careful with what you read. Marketing material around fast onboarding circulates widely, including a 48-hour figure. Mamo's own help centre says an account is typically verified within 2 to 3 business days once the information is complete and the application is approved. Treat 48 hours as a vendor promise and 2 to 3 business days as the published expectation, then add time for whatever they come back and ask for.
The application killers are the same three every time. A licence activity that does not match what your website sells will stall in review. An expired residence visa on the signatory stops the file until it is renewed. An IBAN registered to a name that differs from the licensed entity passes application review and then fails at your first payout, which is the worst moment to discover it.
Getting Mamo into your actual workflow
Mamo covers Visa, Mastercard, American Express, mada, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Tabby, and there are four realistic ways to plug it in.
- Payment links from the dashboard, shared over email, SMS or chat. No developer required.
- The WhatsApp bot. You message +971 58 558 6626 from the number registered to your account, send an amount such as 499.99, and get a link back in AED. It is automated end to end and does not put you through to a human. It also does not let you attach a description or reference to the link, which matters later.
- E-commerce plugins for Shopify, WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento, plus Zapier and Make for no-code wiring.
- The REST API with webhooks, an inline checkout you can embed, a Flutter SDK, and support for embedding checkout in native or React Native apps.
For a service business in Dubai the link route covers most of the need on day one. The API route is what you want once someone is generating more than a handful of links a day, because a human typing amounts into a bot at 40 links a week is a person doing machine work. We wrote up how that plays out specifically over chat in our guide to sending payment links through WhatsApp.
The part that actually decides whether this saves you anything
Mamo collects money. It does not update your CRM, chase the customer who opened the link and did not pay, or tell your calendar that a slot is now confirmed. That gap is where most of the labour hides.
Here is what a wired-up version looks like on a booking that came in at 02:40 on a Saturday. The agent qualifies in chat, quotes the correct rate, calls the Mamo API to create a link with the deal reference on it, and drops it into the thread. The customer pays. The webhook fires, the deal moves to paid with the amount attached, the calendar slot locks, the confirmation goes out with the booking details, and the reconciliation line is written before anyone wakes up. Nobody opened a dashboard at any point.
The unwired version is a person copying an amount from a chat into a dashboard, copying a link back, and then checking the payments screen twice a day to see who paid so they can move a card in the CRM. On our own numbers that class of copy-paste work runs around AED 2,000 a month in salary for a small team, and slow or missed responses cost roughly another AED 4,100 a month in leads that go elsewhere. Those are our figures on our own business and yours will differ, but the shape of the loss is consistent across every Dubai SMB we have opened the books on.
This is why the WhatsApp bot's lack of a description field matters. A link with no reference on it produces a payment you cannot match to a deal automatically, so someone matches it by hand. One field decides whether reconciliation is a webhook or a job.
We run this on ourselves before we sell it. The studio side of the group sells and collects through the agent, with nobody in the thread. If you want the chat-to-payment half of it, that is our WhatsApp AI sales agent. If you already have people selling and just want the link, webhook and CRM update to stop being manual, that is one process on autopilot from AED 6,000 to set up and AED 1,200 a month to run.
Gaps worth knowing before you commit
Four things I would want said plainly before signing anything.
The starting cap on each customer payment is AED 50,000. Mamo says it raises this to whatever you need after an internal review, but it is a review, not a switch, and if you sell AED 80,000 packages you need that conversation before your first big client tries to pay.
Same-day settlement is a paid add-on for eligible businesses, and eligibility is not published as a formula. Do not build a cash plan around it until you have it in writing for your own account.
Tabby at 6.9% + AED 1 is a conversion tool with a real price. Measure the lift before you leave it on permanently.
And the fixed AED 1 on the Growth plan is brutal on small tickets. On an AED 25 sale it is 4% on top of the 2.9%, giving an effective 6.9%. Any business selling low-value items should either raise the minimum basket or move up the plan ladder early.
Mamo, Ziina or Tap
Short version, because the fee detail on the other two belongs in their own articles.
Mamo fits an SMB that wants to invoice, send links and take card payments without building anything, and that expects volume to grow enough for a plan ladder to matter. The published pricing and the plugin coverage are the reason to pick it.
Ziina aims lower, at solo operators and freelancers who need a link and a QR code and have no website. The API surface is thinner, which caps what you can automate around it.
Tap sells regional reach across the GCC and heavier merchant integrations, which is the right answer if you are billing in several Gulf markets rather than only the UAE.
The wider three-way comparison of the enterprise-leaning gateways sits in our breakdown of Telr, PayTabs and Stripe for UAE merchants, so this piece stays on Mamo.
Whichever you pick, the plan decision takes ten minutes with your last three statements and the arithmetic above. The part that takes longer is deciding what happens in the ninety seconds after the money arrives, and that is the part we look at in a growth audit, from AED 3,000.
