Read that sequence again, because it is worse than an ordinary hold. A hold pending investigation is at least a process. This is the process concluding in the merchant’s favor, in Braintree’s own dispute system, and the money staying frozen anyway, out of an original $23,000 at stake. The surrounding record repeats the shape at every scale: reserves imposed without warning while support quoted “2-3 business days” availability that never came, with the merchant reporting they were encouraged to keep processing, which grew the pot being held; a merchant frozen entirely, all funds held and transactions blocked within a week of a chargeback, without notice; a business reporting its service cancelled over fraud its own gateway had approved, with thousands still held; and a merchant who begged for one week, in writing, for Braintree to simply verify $4,322.48 in suspicious transactions that had passed Braintree’s own fraud screening, and received no reply at all. The pattern independent analysis distills from the record: fraudulent transactions approved by the system that the business is later asked to absorb.

Independent review documents no class action lawsuits filed against Braintree and no FTC complaints against the company, and no state attorney general actions or card network fines against the Braintree merchant business were located. Two caveats, per our published rules. First, Rule 10: Braintree’s dispute terms route merchants toward individual resolution, and a clean class docket under such terms is interpreted accordingly, it can be evidence of good conduct, or evidence of good drafting. Second, Rule 2: parent company PayPal’s own regulatory history, including consumer-side matters with federal agencies, belongs to the parent’s consumer business and is displayed rather than scored; merchants weighing the corporate family may weigh it themselves.

The paper earns real credit: no early termination fee, no monthly minimums, no PCI fees, no annual fee, month-to-month terms, published pricing, and contractual data portability on exit. Now the deduction that caps it, applied under Rule 6 of our published methodology, exactly as it was applied to Square and Stripe: price level is a fee practice. From our own audit files, labeled as first-party professional experience under Rule 9: when weAudit converts merchants off flat-rate providers onto transparent interchange-plus pricing, the documented effective savings run on the order of 50 to 60 basis points of total volume. Braintree’s standard flat rate carries that same structural premium, disclosed, published, and still roughly half a percent of every dollar you process, year after year, and under Rule 5 the interchange cost and Braintree’s margin never appear on any statement where you could check. A high price told to your face is still a high price. Additional deductions: documented reporting that pricing increases beginning on the parent side have bled into existing accounts, and documented complaints of unknown monthly charges at the margins. The category lands one point above Square and Stripe for the two things their paper lacks: the contractual right to leave with your customer data, and a documented interchange-plus path for merchants with the volume to demand it.

Three consumer platforms, three failing averages, one unmeasurable BBB file, and themes that concentrate precisely where a merchant is most vulnerable: money already earned. The documented hold record is detailed above. The resolution record is its own finding: support reachable only by channels that route to the parent, a documented one-week silence on a time-sensitive fraud verification, emails described as ignored, and, in the words of a decade-long customer migrating away, tech support that remains good while the customer-facing organization is “the very worst I have ever worked with.” The category retains points because the funding cycle, when accounts are healthy, is documented as consistent and automatic. The complaints are not about Tuesday deposits. They are about what happens the day something goes wrong.

Published pricing earns real credit, and the public parent’s disclosure applies. The deductions: the flat-rate margin invisibility scored under Rule 5; the merged BBB file that makes the unit’s complaint record unresearchable; a brand in documented dissolution, with the company website redirecting to the parent’s domain and phone lines answered by a parent that, per the record, doesn’t recognize the subsidiary’s name; and undisclosed risk criteria, the trigger points for reserves, freezes, and terminations that the documented record shows arriving without warning, which no merchant can read in advance. A merchant can know exactly what Braintree charges and still have no way to know when Braintree will decide to stop paying.

Is Braintree a good processor? Based on the documented record, Braintree scored 58 out of 100 under the published weAudit Rating Methodology, a band reserved for companies whose documented record warrants extreme caution: flat-rate pricing that runs roughly 50 to 60 basis points above auditable alternatives in our own audit files, documented no-warning reserves and account freezes, dispute funds unpaid more than a year after being won, and support that routes to a parent company. The contract terms are the cleanest we have documented; the price of the pricing and the failure mode are what the score measures.

Three things to do this week: