Key takeaways
- Every platform in this category has the same feature list. The differences are commercial and structural, not functional.
- Four questions decide most of it: who is merchant of record, are card tokens portable, is there a contract term, and is the fee flat or a percentage.
- Get the answers in writing before signing. A vendor unwilling to write them down has answered you.
- Published pricing is itself a feature, because it lets you model your unit economics before you are committed.
- Ask what happens on the day you leave. The answer tells you more than any demo.
The four that decide it
If you only ask four things, ask these. They determine your economics, your ownership and your exit cost, and no feature comparison will surface any of them.
- Who is the merchant of record? Whose legal entity is the merchant account opened under, and what appears as the statement descriptor on a patient's card?
- Are card tokens portable? If I leave, will you release the stored payment credentials to my new processor, in writing?
- Is there a contract term? A twelve-month minimum means a mistake is a year long.
- Is the fee flat or a percentage of billings? And if there is a transaction fee, what is the rate and does it fall with volume?
Questions about money
Beyond the headline fee, the add-ons are where proposals diverge from each other most.
- What is the one-time setup or implementation fee, and what does it include?
- Is there a separate storefront build fee, and does it change by complexity tier?
- Is there a per-order or per-patient support fee above a volume threshold?
- Are additional product categories charged separately?
- Does the platform take any margin on medication?
- What is the payment processing rate, and how does it compare to the processor's own published rate?
Questions about fulfillment
Pharmacy is the layer most likely to be described optimistically in a demo and discovered painfully in week six.
- How many pharmacies are integrated and routing today, not planned?
- Which specific states and SKUs are live right now?
- Which partners are qualified for cold chain, and what happens to a temperature-sensitive order in a state where none are?
- What happens operationally when a pharmacy has a backorder? Is it a routing event or a stoppage?
- Can I add my own pharmacy as a routing destination?
Questions about compliance
These are the ones where a vague answer is itself the answer.
- Do you sign a Business Associate Agreement, on every tier, as standard?
- Who is the covered entity in your standard structure, and who carries the breach notification obligation?
- Is LegitScript handled, and at what cost and what timeline?
- Do you hold SOC 2 Type II, and if not, what do you hold?
- Have you had a data breach, and if so, what happened to the brands running on you at the time?
Questions about growing
A platform that fits one brand at 200 patients may not fit three brands at 3,000, and discovering that later is expensive.
- Can I run multiple brands from one account, or does each require a new contract and a new implementation fee?
- Does the transaction rate improve as volume grows, or stay fixed?
- How does billing handle a therapy where the dose changes over the patient's life?
- What is the failed-payment recovery story, and what percentage does it actually recover?
- Can I export my data, in full, and how fast?
What a good answer sounds like
Good answers are specific and unflattering in at least one place. A vendor who tells you the one thing they are worse at is far more likely to be telling the truth about the rest.
Bad answers cluster around three patterns: pricing that requires a call, timelines given as ranges without a mechanism, and any version of we can discuss that at contract stage in response to a question about ownership. That is not a negotiating posture. It is a preview.
Our answers to all twelve are already published
Merchant of record: your brand, every tier. Card tokens: portable, exported within 24 hours on request. Contract term: none. Fee: published flat, $1,500 to $5,000 a month, transaction fee 3% falling to 1.5%, zero revenue share, zero medication markup.
The one we lose on: we do not hold SOC 2 Type II attestation and some competitors do. If that is a procurement gate for you, it is a real reason to choose someone else, and we would rather say so here than let you discover it in week three.
Conclusion
Platform selection in this category is not a features exercise, because the features converged years ago. It is a contract exercise.
The twelve questions above take twenty minutes to ask and will separate a shortlist faster than any demo. Ask them in writing. The willingness to answer in writing is itself most of the signal.
Frequently asked questions
What is the single most important question?
Who is the merchant of record, closely followed by whether card tokens are portable. Together they determine whether you own your revenue and what leaving costs. Everything else is recoverable; those two are not, once you have a book of subscribers.
Should I care about SOC 2?
It depends on your buyer. For a direct-to-consumer brand it is rarely decisive. For anything with an enterprise or employer channel it is frequently a hard procurement gate. Ask what a platform holds rather than assuming, and be suspicious of anyone who implies attestation they do not have.
How do I compare platforms that will not publish pricing?
Build the model with a published platform's numbers, then ask the unpublished ones to fill in the same fields in writing: setup, monthly, transaction rate, percentage of billings, and every per-order and per-category add-on. If they will not, you have learned something.
Anmol SethiFounder
Ran direct-to-consumer telehealth brands and paid a revenue share on every dollar they earned. Built PharmaBro as the infrastructure he wanted to buy.