Originally published at intally.hkdfc.net.

Accepting Alipay in WHMCS: 4 options for 2026, with the actual math

WHMCS ships with PayPal, Stripe, and credit card gateways out of the box. If you want to take Alipay (mainland China), or HKD/USD paid via an Alipay+ wallet from a customer in HK / Taiwan / Singapore / Malaysia, WHMCS gives you nothing.

If you sell hosting and any meaningful slice of your buyers is Chinese-speaking, missing this rail probably costs you 30 to 50 percent of would-be conversions. tbh I underestimated this for years.

Quick disclosure before the math: I run Intally (a small WHMCS / WordPress plugin shop) and one of our plugins is in option 4 below. So this isn't neutral. I tried to write it the way I'd want someone else to write it for me when I was comparing, which means showing the cases where you should not pick option 4.

The four real paths

There are basically four ways to do this in 2026:

1. Build it yourself against the Alipay Open Platform SDK
2. Use a third-party payment aggregator (LianLian, cross-border acquirers, Stripe-Alipay, etc.)
3. Buy a ready-made WHMCS module from ModulesGarden or CodeCanyon
4. Integrate Antom directly (Ant International's official API, the thing Alipay+ runs on)

Below is what each one actually costs in money and time, if you're a solo or small hosting shop.

Option 1: roll your own against Alipay Open Platform

Best fit: teams with a dedicated backend dev and high volume.

• Fee rate: 0 percent platform cut. Bank settlement charges 0.1 to 0.2 percent on top
• Monthly fee: free
• Integration effort: high. RSA2 signing, callback verification, WHMCS gateway hooks (gatewayCallback, refundCallback), plus a reconciliation script
• Settlement: T+1 to your merchant bank
• Maintenance: Alipay's API changes every 1 to 2 years. Signing, async callbacks, refund reconciliation, each has sharp edges. Realistically 2 to 3 weeks of engineer time per year, ongoing
• Docs: all in Chinese, and not great. Noticeably rougher than what you'd expect from a Stripe-tier SaaS

If you're under $20k/month in volume and don't already have a backend dev who reads Chinese docs comfortably, this is not where I'd start.

Option 2: third-party aggregators

Best fit: low volume, no dev appetite.

• Fee rate: 2 to 4 percent. LianLian around 2.5 percent, Stripe-Alipay around 3.5 percent, others vary
• Monthly fee: usually free, some charge $30 to $50/mo
• Integration effort: low. There are existing WHMCS modules, you fill in 3 to 5 fields
• Settlement: T+1 to T+3
• Catches:
  • Stripe-Alipay is restricted in mainland China. Some IP ranges get blocked outright
  • Many aggregators don't actually support ALIPAY_CN. They support the Alipay+ wallets used in HK / TW / SEA, which is a different rail
  • KYC requirements are not lighter than going direct. You still need the same paperwork

Quick math. If you do $5,000/mo and pay 2.5 percent, that's $125/mo, $1,500/yr, $7,500 over 5 years. For a lot of shops that's more than the one-time KYC pain of going direct.

Option 3: WHMCS Marketplace modules

ModulesGarden, CodeCanyon, etc. Search "WHMCS Alipay" and you'll find them.

• Fee rate: the plugin itself is 0 percent. The underlying rail might not be
• Price: $179 to $499/yr typical, ModulesGarden pricing
• Integration effort: medium. Install, configure, test against your merchant account
• Catches:
  • A lot of these plugins are wrappers around an aggregator. So you're paying both the aggregator's 2 to 4 percent cut and the plugin's annual license fee. Double dipping yourself
  • Maintenance varies wildly. If the latest release is from 2024, skip it. Alipay's API has shifted at least once since then
  • Most of them ship encrypted source. When something breaks you're filing a vendor ticket and waiting

Two things to check before you buy: does it call the official API directly, and has it been updated in the last 90 days.

Option 4: integrate Antom directly

Antom is Ant International's unified payment API for overseas merchants. The consumer-facing brand is Alipay+. It covers ALIPAY_CN (mainland) plus the HK / TW / Japan / Korea / SEA wallets in one integration.

• Fee rate: 0 percent platform cut. Your real rate lives in the Antom merchant contract, typically 1.5 to 3 percent. Lower than the aggregators
• Monthly fee: free
• Integration effort: medium. RSA256 signing, callback handling, plus KYC (about 1 week)
• Settlement: T+1 to your merchant bank
• Catches:
  • KYC needs a HK / Singapore / Malaysia (or similar) entity. A pure mainland entity goes through domestic Alipay, which is a different rulebook
  • Docs are in English and genuinely good. Better than the Open Platform docs imo
  • Get the timestamp or signature wrong by one byte and the whole flow fails. Sandbox debugging usually takes 2 to 5 days the first time

Side by side

Option	Cut	Fixed cost	Effort	Settlement	Long-term cost
Build your own	0%	0	High	T+1	2 to 3 weeks/yr maintenance
Aggregator	2-4%	0 to $50/mo	Low	T+1 to T+3	Compounding cut forever
Marketplace plugin	0-2% (depends on rail)	$179-499/yr	Medium	T+1	Annual license + possible double cut
Antom direct	1.5-3%	0	Medium	T+1	One-time KYC

Pick by monthly volume

• Under $500/mo: aggregator. The total cut is small in absolute dollars and you save the engineering hours
• $500 to $5,000/mo: Antom direct. 1.5 to 3 percent beats aggregator 2.5 to 4 percent over time, and your rate gets negotiable as volume grows
• $5,000 to $30,000/mo: Antom direct. The savings here pay for half an engineer
• $30,000+/mo: build it yourself or stay on Antom direct. Depends on team bandwidth

A shortcut if you go with option 4

The bottleneck for option 4 is the integration. If you don't want to write the RSA256 signing, the callback dispatcher, and the WHMCS gateway glue from scratch, there are pre-built plugins that do it for you.

Mine is one of them. antom-gateway, free tier:

• ALIPAY_CN QR code in the invoice page, no off-site redirect
• RSA256 signing plus platform public key verification
• Multi-region API (Asia / North America / Europe) switchable via dropdown
• 11 currencies with correct decimal handling
• One-click refunds
• Sandbox / production toggle

Once you have your Antom credentials, integration goes from "3 weeks of dev time" to "fill 7 fields and save."

If you end up picking option 1, 2, or 3 instead, that's fine. The reason I wrote this is so you don't pick X and six months later realize Y was the better fit.

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WHMCS-plus-Alipay is still a niche topic. Most English teutorials are 2020-era. This is written with May 2026 data.

If your setup differs, ping @intally_channel.