Direct Debit for software platforms: built in or GoCardless?

Direct Debit is the rail UK businesses use for anything that recurs: memberships, rent, fees, subscriptions, service contracts. Pay.UK's annual statistics for 2025 record 5.03 billion Bacs Direct Debit payments in the year, worth £1.53 trillion, up 1.8% and 3.3% on 2024. It is also the rail that platforms most often leave with a third party, because the customer set it up years ago and it works.

That is what makes Direct Debit volume worth looking at. Collections are predictable, the payers rarely change, and there is no interchange, so the cost of a collection is almost entirely the provider's fee. For a platform whose customers run memberships or recurring fees, Direct Debit volume is often larger than card volume and better behaved.

GoCardless publishes its UK pricing. The figures below were checked on 19 October 2026 and exclude VAT, which GoCardless charges on transaction fees invoiced to UK merchants. Direct Debit collections over £2,000 carry an additional 0.3%. The Custom plan, for businesses with £1m or more in annual revenue, has no published rates.

Worked through for one customer of a platform, as an example: a club collecting £45 a month from 600 members makes 600 collections. On the Standard plan each collection costs £0.65, so £390 a month before VAT, £4,680 a year. A letting agent collecting £1,150 from 300 tenants pays the £4 cap on every collection: £1,200 a month, £14,400 a year. A training provider collecting £2,400 a term from 200 learners pays £4 plus the 0.3% large-collection charge of £7.20, so £11.20 on each: £2,240 a term.

Now multiply across every customer. A platform with 500 customers like the club above sees its customers pay, between them, about £2.3m a year in Direct Debit fees at the Standard rate. That money leaves the platform's customers every month, and the platform earns nothing on it. That is the number this guide is about.

Built in means the collection runs under the platform's own payments: the mandate is set up inside the product, the collection is raised by the product on the day the invoice or membership says, the result writes back to the customer's record, and the payout lands with the platform's other payments. Four things change.

1. The platform earns on each collection. The fee is the platform's to set, within what the rail costs, rather than a third party's price list.
2. Failed collections are chased by the product. A collection that fails for insufficient funds is retried or followed up from the customer's record, not from a separate dashboard the customer forgets to check.
3. Reconciliation stops being a job. The collection, its outcome and its payout are tied to the invoice or membership that raised it.
4. The customer has one account, not two. One statement, one place to look, one person to ring.

The cost is that the platform's developer has to build the mandate flow and the collection logic into the product. A payments partner builds the Direct Debit product underneath with the platform and provides the documentation and a test environment; the integration is the platform's own, on its developer's schedule.

The question every platform asks is whether customers have to re-sign their Direct Debit mandates. Usually not. Bacs provides a bulk change process under which Direct Debit instructions are transferred from one service user to another, with a bulk change deed that moves liability for indemnity claims to the new service user. The deed is signed by hand and the sponsoring bank is involved. GoCardless's own guidance for customers moving to it says the bulk change takes four to six weeks and cannot be sped up, and that payers must be told about the change even though no action is needed from them.

The same process works in the other direction. It is planned, not instant, and the service user number arrangement of the customer today decides who signs what. It should be scoped per customer group before anyone is promised a date.

On 11 December 2025 Mollie, the Dutch payments company, announced it had signed an agreement to acquire GoCardless, subject to regulatory approval. On 1 September 2026 the two companies announced the acquisition had completed. GoCardless continues to operate as GoCardless, a Mollie company, under co-founder Hiroki Takeuchi, within a group led by Mollie's chief executive Koen Köppen. The completion announcement says existing customers of either company will see no immediate changes to services, contacts or contracts, and that integration will be gradual.

That is all that is known publicly. Nothing in this guide should be read as a prediction about GoCardless's pricing, product or terms; the announcements make no such statement and neither do we. What the deal does do is give a platform whose customers collect by Direct Debit a reason to look at where those collections sit, who owns the relationship with each customer, and what it would mean for the platform if the terms its customers enjoy today were ever to change, in either direction.

Three questions settle it for most platforms.

1. How many collections do your customers make a month? Take your customers' recurring invoices or memberships and count them. Multiply by a Standard-rate fee for the typical amount. If the figure is a few thousand pounds a year across all your customers, standalone is fine. If it is a few hundred thousand, it is a product line you are giving away.
2. Who should own the customer's Direct Debit relationship? If each customer holds their own account with a standalone provider, that provider owns the mandate, the data and the pricing, and the customer can leave your platform without touching it. If the mandate lives in your product, leaving means re-signing every payer.
3. Can your developer build the mandate and collection flow? It is not the hardest integration in payments, but it is one, and it runs on your developer's schedule. If the answer is not yet, the standalone route is the honest interim.

Platforms with large Direct Debit volumes are the ones for whom built in pays back fastest, because the volume is already there, the payers already recur, and the only thing changing is where the collection runs.