Search for recurring payments in Ukraine and the results come down to two names: LiqPay from PrivatBank and Plata by Mono from monobank. Both can charge a card without the customer present. But they do it differently, and for a product subscription the difference matters.
Two charging models
LiqPay: subscription as a payment mode. In the widget or the API you pass
action: subscribe, a start date and a periodicity. LiqPay then charges the amount on its
own schedule. The store receives a callback with action: regular for every payment.
Convenient: the schedule lives with the payment provider, you need no scheduler. The limit:
the periodicity is month or year only. A subscription “every three weeks” or “weekly”
cannot be built on this, and the amount cannot change within a subscription either.
Plata by Mono: a token and charges from your side. The first payment goes through with a save-card flag, and a token comes back. When to charge, how much and for what is decided by your system: you create an invoice against the token on the day you choose. monobank has no schedule at all.
Convenient: any frequency, any amount; pause and skip are simply “do not create the invoice”. The limit: the scheduler, the retries and the notifications are yours. Tokenisation has to be activated separately through monobank support.
For products with a “bag of coffee every three weeks” or “pet food every six weeks” cycle, the first model is unsuitable by definition. That is why practically every product subscription service, Neocarts included, works with tokens — and with LiqPay too: LiqPay has tokenisation, it just is not called a “subscription”.
Side by side
| LiqPay | Plata by Mono | |
|---|---|---|
| Fee per transaction | 1.5% (negotiable above 300k UAH turnover) | 1.3% (international cards 2%) |
| Account | Current account at PrivatBank (2600 format) | Sole-proprietor or company account at monobank |
| Built-in charge schedule | Yes, subscribe, monthly/yearly only |
No, the store initiates charges |
| Tokenisation for a custom schedule | Yes, card_token |
Yes, after activation through support |
| Apple Pay / Google Pay | Yes | Yes |
| Instalments | Yes, a separate service | Yes, “Purchase in parts” |
| Time to connect | 1–5 business days, site review | Usually a day, through the app |
| Built-in fiscal registrar (PRRO) | Yes | No, a separate fiscalisation service |
The fees differ by two tenths of a percent. On 200,000 UAH of monthly turnover that is 400 UAH — less than the developer hour you will spend on either integration. Choosing by fee makes no sense.
What to actually choose by
Where your account is. LiqPay requires an account at PrivatBank, Plata by Mono an account at monobank. Opening a second account is possible, but it is another bank in the books. If the whole business already sits in one of them, the choice is made.
Fiscalisation. LiqPay has a built-in fiscal registrar that issues a receipt for every operation, recurring charges included. With monobank the receipt has to be issued by a separate service on the payment event. For a subscription this matters: there are many charges and they happen without a person. More in the article on fiscalising recurring charges.
Which cards your customers hold. Customers with monobank cards pay through Plata by Mono with one tap in the app, no card details. That visibly lifts first-payment conversion among under-35s. The LiqPay equivalent is paying through Privat24.
Whether anyone holds the schedule. If you initiate token charges yourself, the two acquirers are equivalent and the question moves to who writes the scheduler, the retries and the dashboard. That is what Neocarts takes on: you connect either one, and the schedule, retries and customer dashboard are already there.
Failed charges: where the difference shows
In the LiqPay subscribe model the payment provider attempts the charge on schedule and
reports the result. The retry is on its side too, but without your control over how many
and when.
In the token model a failed attempt is simply an error in reply to your request. What happens next is up to you: retry in two days, notify the customer, pause after the third failure. It is more work, but it is also the only way not to lose a client whose card simply expired. The working scheme is described in the article on recurring payments in Ukraine.
In short
- A fixed monthly subscription to a service — LiqPay
subscribecovers it on its own. - A product subscription with a frequency the customer picks — tokenisation only, with either acquirer.
- Account at PrivatBank and a built-in fiscal registrar needed — LiqPay.
- A young audience with mono cards and fast onboarding — Plata by Mono.
- No wish to write a scheduler and a dashboard — connect either one to Neocarts, a 5% fee on successful charges on top of the acquirer’s fee, no monthly fee.
If you are on a platform where connecting an acquirer for subscriptions is impossible at all, such as Horoshop or Tilda, the choice disappears: the Neocarts checkout page works with both.