CCBill, Segpay, Epoch and Verotel: the payment processors that accept adult content

CCBill, Segpay, Epoch and Verotel are payment processors that accept the adult businesses mainstream processors turn away. They let a website take card payments for adult content, and they handle the billing in their own name. That is why their names appear on bank statements, and why an adult game studio that wants to sell from its own site ends up talking to one of them.

They exist because of a gap. Stripe prohibits adult content and PayPal does not permit adult digital goods, while Visa and Mastercard allow legal adult content if the merchant is registered and monitored. A specialist processor does the registering and the monitoring. This page explains what the four companies are, what they cost, what they refuse, and what to do if one of them has charged your card. It is not financial advice, and it is not a recommendation of any of them.

Key points

• Four established names: CCBill, Segpay and Epoch in the United States, and Verotel in the Netherlands.
• They accept adult merchants; they do not accept everything. Their content rules come from the card networks and their banks.
• They review before they approve. Expect to show a working site, legal pages and age controls.
• They cost more. Registration with the card networks alone is about $2,000 a year on CCBill’s published fees.
• They bill under their own name. A statement entry naming one of them is a purchase from a site that uses it.
• Most developers never need one. A store or membership platform that accepts adult games takes the payment itself.

The four companies

The claims in the third row are each company’s own, taken from CCBill, Epoch and Verotel. Segpay’s founding year and location come from its CB Insights profile, because its own site could not be read when this page was written. None of the figures has been independently checked.

Why specialist processors exist

A card payment passes through a chain: the card network, the buyer’s bank, the merchant’s bank and a processor. The networks set the rules, and the bank that accepts payments for a merchant answers to the network for that merchant’s conduct.

For adult content the networks’ rules are demanding. The merchant has to be registered as high risk. It has to be coded correctly: LegitScript reports that Visa requires merchant category code 5967 for adult content. Its site has to be monitored. Under the Mastercard standards that took effect in October 2021, as CCBill summarised, a bank must certify that an adult merchant has controls over what it publishes and a process for complaints.

A processor like Stripe, which opens accounts in minutes without a person looking at each site, is not built for that work, and its banks do not want the category. Stripe said so in the statement itch.io published in July 2025: card networks generally support adult content “with the appropriate registrations”, and its banking partners do not.

Specialist processors are the companies that hold those registrations. The details of the network rules are in the Visa and Mastercard adult content policy.

How they differ from Stripe and PayPal

The comparison people search for most is CCBill against Stripe. It is not a choice between two equivalent services. For an adult business, Stripe is not available, and the question is which specialist to use.

What they cost

Specialist processors cost more for two reasons: the card networks charge to register a high-risk merchant, and disputed payments are more common in this category, which the processor prices in.

CCBill’s pricing page is the only public price information we found among the four. It says:

• CCBill offers a flat-rate model with no monthly fees, and other models for larger merchants.
• “High-Risk Registration (Annual)” fees are “paid to card schemes”: $950 for Visa and $1,000 for Mastercard. They apply “only to certain business verticals”.
• Rates are set according to company size, risk level, transaction volume, business type and region. The page gives no percentage for adult merchants.

Figures for the percentage itself circulate on comparison sites and forums, often in the range of 10% to 15% of each sale for adult merchants. We could not confirm any of them against a processor’s own published terms, so treat them as hearsay until you have a written quote.

For a small studio the fixed cost is the part to notice. About $2,000 a year in registration fees has to be earned back before the first sale counts. Ask each processor the same questions in writing:

1. What is the percentage and the per-transaction fee for my category?
2. Which annual registration fees will I pay, and to whom?
3. Is there a setup fee?
4. How often do you pay out, and in which currencies?
5. Do you hold back a reserve, how much and for how long?
6. What do you charge per chargeback and per refund?

What they will not accept

A specialist processor is not a way around content rules. CCBill’s Acceptable Use Policy says it was “created through the integration of card association rules and acquiring bank regulations”. Among its prohibitions:

“The posting or display of any image or wording depicting or related to extreme violence, incest, snuff, scat or the elimination of any bodily waste on another person, mutilation, or rape anywhere on the site in a sexual or erotic manner, including the URL and meta tags.”

A separate line bars any image or wording related to bestiality.

Two details in that wording matter for games.

• “Image or wording.” The rule covers text as well as pictures, and it makes no distinction between photographs and drawings. A visual novel is text and images.
• “Including the URL and meta tags.” The rule reaches the way a site describes and markets itself, not only the product.

The list is close to the one itch.io now applies to paid adult games, and to the themes the card networks name. That is no coincidence: all of them trace back to the same network rules. A game that a mainstream store removed for its themes will usually be refused by a specialist processor for the same themes.

What approval involves

These processors review a business before they open an account. The requirements differ by company, and each publishes its own application process, but the items below come up across the category.

• A working website, or one close enough to launch that a reviewer can see what will be sold.
• Legal pages: terms of service, a privacy policy and a refund policy.
• Age controls appropriate to the countries you sell into.
• A complaints contact, so that someone can report content and get an answer.
• A registered business and identification for its owners.
• Clear descriptions of what is sold. The category on the application has to match the site.

The last item matters more than it looks. A merchant terminated for misdescribing its business can be added to MATCH, a database run by Mastercard of terminated merchants. An entry lasts five years, and other processors check it before opening an account.

Do they accept adult games?

Nothing in the policies we read excludes games as a medium. The processors accept adult businesses, and their rules are about content and conduct, not format.

Three practical points follow.

• The content rules apply in full. Drawn and written work is judged by the same list as video.
• The rules about real people mostly do not. Consent records and identity checks concern people who appear in content. A studio that makes its own game with fictional characters has nobody to verify. A store that hosts other people’s games is in a different position and takes on review duties.
• AI-generated content is watched closely. Visa’s program explicitly includes AI-generated adult content under code 5967, and processors will ask how images were made.

We have not applied to any of the four, so this section describes their published rules and not an outcome. A processor can refuse an application that appears to meet every published rule.

If one of these names is on your bank statement

Many people meet these companies for the first time as an unfamiliar line on a statement. The explanation is usually simple: you, or someone with access to your card, bought a subscription or a product from a website that uses that processor for billing. The processor’s name appears because it took the payment.

CCBill’s consumer support page says that a charge referring to ccbill.com means you purchased a subscription through a merchant that uses CCBill’s billing services. It offers a lookup tool that finds the purchase from two details, such as your email address and card number, and lets you cancel. Support is available by phone, email and live chat at all hours. Epoch offers a similar tool called “Find My Purchase”, and Segpay and Verotel have consumer lookup pages of their own.

If you do not recognise a charge:

1. Look it up on the processor’s own consumer page. Type the address yourself. Do not follow a link from an email or text message.
2. Check for a recurring subscription. Many charges are renewals of a trial that was taken out weeks earlier.
3. Cancel through the processor if you want it to stop.
4. Contact your bank if the lookup finds nothing, or if you are sure nobody with access to your card made the purchase.

Are these companies legitimate? All four are long-established payment businesses, and a charge from one is not in itself a sign of fraud. That is a separate question from whether the website you bought from was trustworthy. Our guide to whether adult game stores are safe covers that side.

Who needs one, and who does not

Most independent developers are in the first two rows. Selling direct gives more control and a larger share of each sale, at the price of the fixed costs and the compliance work described above. Our guides to where adult games can be sold in 2026 and how to make an adult game set out the choice.

itch.io is an example of a store making the same decision at a larger scale. After Stripe told it in 2025 that it could not support sexually explicit content, itch.io said it was speaking to other payment partners about taking the card payments Stripe would not. We could not find an announcement of the result.

The limits of this route

• It depends on the same networks. Every processor that takes Visa and Mastercard follows their rules. A specialist widens who will serve you. It does not widen what can be sold.
• It concentrates risk. A studio with one processor has one point of failure. A second account with another processor is the usual protection against that.
• Rules change with little notice. The Mastercard standards of 2021 gave merchants six months. Not every change has come with that much warning.

For the wider picture, see how payment processors decide which adult games can be sold.

How this page was put together

Each company is described from its own website where that could be read, and from the source named in the text where it could not. Fees are quoted only where a processor publishes them, which meant CCBill alone. Content rules are quoted from CCBill’s Acceptable Use Policy because it is public and specific; the other three will have rules of their own, which we did not read. The studio has not applied to, used or been paid by any of these companies, and nothing here is a recommendation.

This page was written on 7 October 2026 and will be updated when a processor publishes new terms. To report an error, see the corrections standard.