# PayTabs in Dubai: fees, payout terms, and integration
PayTabs charges UAE merchants a reported 2.85–2.9% plus AED 1 per transaction on its pay-as-you-go plan, with no setup cost. Its monthly plan is reported at roughly AED 184 per month for the same 2.85% but a far smaller fixed fee, around AED 0.27 per transaction. Approval takes 3–5 working days once documents are complete, and API integration usually finishes inside 24–48 hours. The number nobody puts on a comparison page: your money does not move until the balance clears about USD 300, and the automatic payout runs once a week.
Every figure here is a reported band, not a rate card. Gateway pricing in the UAE moves with your volume, business category and how hard you negotiate, so confirm your own quote against a month of real transactions.
We collect payments this way for a Dubai studio group. Links are generated by API, dropped into the WhatsApp thread where the customer asked to pay, and the webhook flips the deal to paid without anyone touching a dashboard. The failure points below are ones we have run into, not ones we read about.
What PayTabs charges per transaction
The headline structure is simple enough. On the plan with no monthly commitment you pay a percentage of the sale plus a flat fee per successful transaction, and nothing for onboarding or integration.
| Item | Reported figure | Notes | |---|---|---| | Pay-as-you-go rate | ~2.85–2.9% + AED 1 | No monthly fee, no setup fee | | Monthly plan | ~AED 184/mo, 2.85% + ~AED 0.27 | Same percentage, smaller fixed fee | | Enterprise | Negotiated | Volume-based, requires a conversation | | Setup / integration | AED 0 reported | Plugins and API access included | | Chargeback fee | ~USD 25 per case (≈AED 92) | UAE market band runs AED 50–150 | | Automatic payout threshold | ~USD 300 | Balance must clear this to release |
Two details matter more than the percentage. First, the fixed fee is charged per successful transaction, so it bites hardest on small tickets: AED 1 on an AED 25 sale is another 4% on top of the 2.85%. Second, the percentage barely moves between the two SMB plans. What moves is the flat component.
International cards, Amex and cross-currency settlements price above the domestic band, the same as with every UAE gateway. If a meaningful share of your buyers pay from outside the Emirates, your effective rate will land above 2.9% regardless of what the pricing page says. Pull one real month of transactions and calculate the blended rate before you compare anyone.
Picking a plan by volume: where the break-even actually sits
Since both SMB plans carry the same 2.85%, the choice reduces to arithmetic on the fixed fee. The gap is roughly AED 0.73 per transaction (AED 1.00 versus AED 0.27). Divide the monthly plan cost by that gap: 183.62 ÷ 0.73 ≈ 251.
Under about 250 transactions a month, the pay-as-you-go plan is cheaper. Above it, the monthly plan wins, and the gap widens fast. At 1,000 transactions a month you save around AED 546 by paying the monthly fee. At 80 transactions you burn roughly AED 125 a month for nothing.
Your average order value never enters this calculation. A clinic taking 60 payments of AED 3,000 and an e-com store taking 60 payments of AED 90 make the same plan decision. That is counter-intuitive enough that plenty of Dubai merchants sit on the wrong plan for a year. If your transaction count swings seasonally, check it quarterly rather than setting it once.
For a broader view of how PayTabs stacks against Telr, Tap and Network International, the comparison of UAE gateways by fee model covers the field. This piece stays on PayTabs.
Settlement and payout are two different dates
This is where most merchants misread their cash position. Settlement is when the transaction clears from the card networks into your PayTabs balance. Payout is when PayTabs sends that balance to your bank. They are separate events with separate clocks.
Reported settlement timing runs T+1 for local debit rails and around T+3 for Visa and Mastercard, with some sources citing up to T+5 depending on merchant category and acquiring bank. Once you or the automatic schedule initiates a payout, the transfer to your bank account typically lands within 24–48 hours. Stack those together and the honest expectation for a Visa payment on a Sunday is money in the bank the following week.
The automatic payout runs weekly, and it only fires if the available balance is at or above roughly USD 300, about AED 1,100. For a business selling AED 20 digital items, that is 55 sales sitting in a holding balance before anything moves. For a consultancy invoicing AED 12,000 at a time, the threshold is irrelevant.
There is also a payment gateway convention worth stating plainly: a customer seeing "payment successful" on the checkout page tells you nothing about when you can spend the money. If your cash planning is built on the confirmation screen, you will be short at least once. Build the forecast on payout dates.
Documents PayTabs asks for, and why
Onboarding is a bank KYC process wearing a gateway's branding. The acquiring bank behind PayTabs carries the risk if your business turns out to be something other than what it claimed, so the document list exists to prove the entity, the people behind it, and the activity.
What you will be asked for in the UAE:
- Valid trade licence, current, showing the activity you actually sell
- Memorandum and Articles of Association, or the equivalent constitutional documents
- Emirates ID, passport copy and residence visa page for the authorised signatory and beneficial owners
- Bank account details, including IBAN and an account name that matches the licensed entity
- Website or app URL, live, with visible pricing, refund policy, delivery terms and contact details
- Confirmation of business activity, sometimes with sample products or a demo login
Three things break applications in practice, and all three are avoidable. Licence activity that does not match the site is the most common: a licence for management consultancy and a site selling supplements will stall in review, because the acquirer cannot classify the merchant. An expired residence visa on the signatory is the second, and it stops the file dead until renewed. The third is an IBAN entered with an account name that differs from the licensed entity name, which passes application review and then fails at the first payout, leaving money parked while support tickets travel.
Fix all three before you apply and you skip most of the back and forth. If your entity, your site and your bank account genuinely do not line up, sort the licence first.
Timeline: from application to first live payment
Reported approval time is 3–5 working days for a straightforward SMB application with clean documents. Higher-risk categories, travel, crypto-adjacent, subscriptions with long delivery windows, take longer and sometimes require a rolling reserve.
Integration is the fast part. PayTabs publishes plugins for WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento and similar, plus a REST API for hosted payment pages and payment links. A developer with credentials in hand can have test transactions passing in a few hours and production live within 24–48 hours.
Then a gap opens that nobody schedules. The gateway is live, and nothing tells your team a payment happened. Someone opens the PayTabs dashboard in the morning, matches payments against orders, updates the CRM by hand, and forwards receipts. That work is real, it recurs daily, and it is what the automation layer removes. Building it during setup costs far less than retrofitting it after six months of manual habits.
Connecting PayTabs to your site, WhatsApp and CRM
Three connections do most of the work, and only the first one comes out of the box.
The checkout on your site is the easy one. Install the plugin, configure credentials, run small real transactions before you trust sandbox results. Plugin versions drift against platform versions, and a silent failure on live cards while sandbox passes is a genuine pattern.
The payment link inside a chat is the one that changes revenue. PayTabs has no native WhatsApp channel, so nothing sends a link into a conversation by itself. What works is generating the link by API with the amount and reference already filled, then having the agent post it in the same thread within seconds of the customer asking. Our WhatsApp sales agent does exactly that, including the follow-up when the link goes unclicked.
The webhook is the connection most teams skip. PayTabs fires a transaction status callback when a payment succeeds, fails or is refunded. Catch it, verify the signature, match the reference to the deal, set status to paid, timestamp it, notify the owner. That single wire removes daily dashboard checking and stops deals sitting in "quoted" three days after the money cleared. Wiring one process end to end like this runs from AED 6,000 to set up and AED 1,200 a month on our automation build.
If the flow you need does not exist in any tool, that becomes software rather than an integration, a separate build from AED 9,000, not an automation project.
Chargebacks, refunds and what costs money
A cardholder in the UAE generally has around 45 days from the statement date to dispute a transaction, though the exact window depends on the card scheme and the reason code. Once a dispute is raised, PayTabs applies a chargeback fee, reported at USD 25 per case, roughly AED 92. Regional gateways sit in an AED 50–150 band for the same event.
The fee is charged whether or not you win. You then have a limited window, usually 7–10 days, to submit evidence: the signed quote, the delivery proof, the chat transcript where the customer confirmed the booking. Merchants who keep that evidence in a CRM record win disputes. Merchants who keep it in a WhatsApp thread on someone's personal phone usually do not bother responding, and lose by default.
Refunds are cheaper and slower. You initiate them from the dashboard or the API, and the money reaches the cardholder in 5–14 working days depending on the issuing bank. The processing percentage on the original transaction is typically not returned to you, so a full refund on an AED 5,000 sale still costs around AED 143. High-refund businesses should model this as a line in unit economics rather than treating it as noise.
One practical control: automating the refund status back into the CRM stops the same customer being chased for payment by a follow-up sequence two days after you refunded them. That happens more than anyone admits.
Who PayTabs is wrong for
Low-ticket, low-volume sellers get hurt by the payout threshold. If your monthly turnover sits under AED 1,100, your balance may not clear the automatic payout trigger, and money accumulates instead of arriving.
High-volume merchants above roughly AED 500,000 a month usually do better negotiating directly with an acquirer or an enterprise processor, where blended rates below 2.5% are achievable. Paying a standard SMB rate on that volume costs more per year than a finance hire.
Businesses selling to Saudi buyers should check mada support and Arabic checkout coverage carefully against their real traffic mix, because a checkout that does not carry the local method the buyer expects loses the sale before the fee ever applies.
And anyone expecting the gateway to run their sales process will be disappointed. PayTabs collects money. It will not tell your team a payment landed, will not update a deal, and will not chase the customer who opened the link and closed it. That layer is a separate build, and a growth audit maps where your current flow stops moving on its own.
