These 14 questions are answered in full on this page rather than behind a click, and none of them repeats one of the 6 short answers on the home page.
Where do PayPerMerchant's MCA leads come from?
- PayPerMerchant generates every merchant cash advance application through its own advertising. We run the ads on our own ad account, with our own budget, which means our money buys the click before a funder buys the lead. Nothing is purchased from a list broker, scraped from a UCC filing, bought from an aggregator, or acquired from another vendor upstream. That matters for two reasons a funder can check. First, a merchant who filled out our form knows they asked about capital, so the first dial is not a cold call to someone who never opted in. Second, because there is nobody upstream, there is nobody else holding a copy of the record to sell later. The whole chain from ad impression to your CRM is one company, and that is what makes the exclusivity claim something we can actually enforce rather than promise.
What has to be true before a merchant becomes a PayPerMerchant lead?
- A PayPerMerchant lead clears nine gates before the record is released. The person filling in the form must be the owner and not an employee. The business must be asking for $20,000 or more, must have traded for 12 months or more, must show $200,000 or more in annual revenue, and must show $15,000 or more in monthly deposits with statements attached. The owner's FICO must be 580 or higher. The file must carry two or fewer open positions and no defaults, liens or bankruptcies. And the phone must have been answered before the record left our system. Miss any one of those and the record does not become a lead, which is the difference between a qualification standard and a marketing adjective.
How much does an exclusive MCA lead cost in 2026?
- A PayPerMerchant lead costs $60. That is flat at every volume, so a funder ordering 10 and a funder ordering 500 pay the same figure per lead. There is no minimum order, no setup fee, no monthly platform fee, no per-seat charge and no ad budget on the buyer's side, because the advertising spend sits with us. The reason the price is published at all is that almost nothing in this category is. Most MCA lead vendors quote on a call, which makes the buyer's job of comparing two vendors nearly impossible and is a large part of why funders in this market get burned. A published number is also checkable, which is the point: a funder can hold $60 against whatever they are paying now and against what it costs them to run their own ads, without booking a call to find out.
Does PayPerMerchant sell business loan or SBA leads?
- No. PayPerMerchant sells merchant cash advance leads only. Not leads for business loans, not SBA, not equipment finance, not lines of credit. The specialisation is the product rather than a limitation on it, and the nine gates a record clears are the evidence: $15,000 or more in monthly deposits with statements attached, two or fewer open positions, a 580 FICO, 12 months in business, $200,000 in annual revenue. Those are the numbers an MCA underwriter reads before writing an advance. They are not the numbers an SBA lender or an equipment lessor reads, and a lead qualified against one set and dialled for the other is a wasted call at both ends. A shop buying for a term loan product should buy from somebody who qualifies merchants for that product. It also answers the question funders ask second, which is what else we sell. Nothing else.
Are PayPerMerchant leads exclusive, or sold to more than one funder?
- Every PayPerMerchant lead goes to exactly one buyer. One merchant, one buyer, one time. The record is not shared with a second funder at the moment of sale, and it is never resold six months later as aged data at a lower price, which is the part most exclusivity claims quietly leave open. That second half is where the word usually breaks down in this category: a vendor can honour exclusivity on the day and still sell the same file into an aged list a quarter later, and the merchant who took four calls in an hour cannot tell the difference. Exclusive here means one buyer at the sale and never resold at any age or any price. If a funder wants that written into the agreement rather than stated on a page, that is a reasonable thing to ask for and we will put it in writing.
What happens when a lead is bad?
- You get one credit for every lead you buy from PayPerMerchant. A credit is spent when a real merchant lands in your CRM. If a lead arrives with a fake phone number, a junk name, or anything else that is plainly not a real merchant, you mark it and the credit goes back. There is no time limit on flagging, no form to fill in and no argument. Our system cannot always tell the difference between a real submission and someone entering nonsense, so the buyer marking it is the honest mechanism rather than a dispute process designed to be tiring. The absence of a clock is deliberate: a 72 hour window is a policy that mostly protects the vendor. A funder working a batch does not always get to every record inside three days, and a lead that turns out to be junk on day five was junk on day one. The credit model also keeps the accounting simple: a funder always knows how many real merchants are left in what they paid for.
How fast does a lead reach my CRM?
- PayPerMerchant delivers live. The merchant hits submit and the record is in the buyer's CRM about 50 milliseconds later, sent by an API call from our system into yours. There is no nightly CSV to import, no portal to log into and no daily batch. Speed is the point rather than a feature: a merchant who has just asked about capital is comparing options in the same session, and the funder who calls first is talking to someone whose problem is still in front of them. Every hour a record waits is an hour a competitor spends. We publish the trigger rather than a turnaround in hours, because a queue with a service level attached is still a queue: the record is released the moment the merchant's phone has been answered. It also arrives where the work already happens, entering the same routing, the same dial list and the same reporting as everything else in the CRM.
Is PayPerMerchant a lender or a funder?
- No. PayPerMerchant is a lead seller. It is not a lender, not a funder, not a broker, not an ISO and not a payment processor, and it does not originate, underwrite or fund financing. It sells merchant cash advance applications to the funders and ISOs who do that work. The distinction matters more than it looks, because the word merchant collides with merchant services and payment processing, and a funder who assumes we compete with them for the deal would reasonably not buy from us. We never take a position in a deal, never earn a share of an advance, and never make a credit decision. The only thing we are paid for is the lead itself. That alignment is worth stating plainly: because our revenue comes from selling one record to one buyer rather than from the size of any advance, we have no reason to push a merchant toward a bigger deal than they asked for, and no reason to care which funder ends up writing it.
Who is PayPerMerchant for, and who is it not for?
- PayPerMerchant sells to MCA funders, ISOs and broker shops with someone whose job is to call. It is a fit for a shop that already has a dialer and a CRM, and that is currently buying merchant cash advance leads from someone else or generating its own. It is not a fit for a shop buying business loan, SBA or equipment finance leads, because we sell merchant cash advance applications and nothing else. It is not a fit for a merchant looking for capital: we do not lend and cannot help with that, and a business owner who has landed here should go to a funder directly. And it is not a fit for a shop with no capacity to call, because a lead nobody dials is a lead nobody should have bought. Being specific about the misfit is deliberate. A vendor who tells every shop it is a fit will sell to someone with no capacity to work the records, that shop will conclude the leads were bad, and both sides lose.
What is actually in an MCA lead from PayPerMerchant?
- A PayPerMerchant lead carries the owner's name and phone number, the business name, the amount of capital requested, time in business, annual revenue, monthly deposits with statements attached, FICO, and the count of open positions. Every one of those fields carries a value that cleared a published gate rather than a blank the buyer has to chase. That is the difference this category tends to hide: a great many things sold as qualified MCA leads are a name and a phone number, and the qualification happens on the funder's dial rather than before it. The record also carries the consent captured at submission, so the funder can see what the merchant agreed to. Every one of those fields is also a filter a funder can hold us to. If a record arrives showing 8 months in business or $90,000 in revenue, it missed a published gate, and that is a credit rather than a conversation.
Why does a lead show monthly deposits and not just revenue?
- PayPerMerchant requires $15,000 or more in monthly deposits with statements attached, on top of the $200,000 annual revenue minimum, because deposits are the repayment source and revenue is a claim. A business owner filling in a form has a number in mind for annual revenue and that number is frequently optimistic. Bank deposits are evidence of the same thing, and they are what an underwriter will look at anyway when the file reaches them. Requiring both means the gap between what a merchant says and what the account shows surfaces before a funder spends a dial on it rather than three days later during underwriting. It also changes what the first call sounds like. A funder who can already see $15,000 in monthly deposits is having a conversation about structure, not a conversation about whether there is anything to structure.
Why are merchants with three or more open positions excluded?
- PayPerMerchant excludes any merchant carrying more than two open positions. Stacking is where repayment tends to break: each additional daily or weekly remittance takes another slice of the same deposits, and past the second position the arithmetic gets hostile fast. A funder can of course decide a third position is acceptable on a particular file, and some do. We set the gate at two because the alternative is passing the judgement call to the buyer on every record, which turns a qualification standard into a suggestion. A merchant already carrying three positions is usually a workout conversation rather than a new advance. The gate is also one of the few in this list that protects the merchant as much as the buyer. A business owner taking a fourth position is rarely solving the problem that made them take the third, and a lead that turns into a default helps nobody in the chain.
What does PayPerMerchant do with a merchant's data after the lead is sold?
- PayPerMerchant sells each merchant record to exactly one funder and does not sell it again. The record is not shared with a second buyer at any point, not offered later as aged data, and not sold into a list. Under California law, selling a lead is a sale of personal information, which is why this site carries a privacy policy and a do not sell page rather than boilerplate, and why a merchant can ask us to delete or stop selling their information. Lead generation is one of the few businesses where the privacy page is a working document rather than a formality, and treating it as one is a reasonable thing for a funder to check before buying. A vendor that cannot say clearly what happens to a record after it is sold is a vendor whose exclusivity claim has nothing behind it, because the two questions are the same question asked from different ends.
How does a funder start with PayPerMerchant?
- A funder starts with a short call to set the delivery destination and confirm the buy box. It covers where the records should land, which states and deal sizes a shop wants, and what it will and will not work, so the first records that arrive are already filtered to something worth dialing rather than a generic sample. After that a funder orders leads at $60 each, flat at every volume, with no minimum order, no retainer, no minimum term and no monthly commitment on top of it. There is a short lead purchase agreement covering exclusivity, the credit policy and consent, and nothing in it that ties a shop to a second order. We would rather earn that second order than lock in the first, which is why the terms are printed on this page instead of quoted on the call.