Oh, you definitely pay for the privilege of submitting Auth requests. You have to have a merchant account with the card issuer. The systems I've worked with wen

Oh, you definitely pay for the privilege of submitting Auth requests. You have to have a merchant account with the card issuer. The systems I've worked with went through a third-party gateway system which connects out to all the different card issuers. It's definitely not cheap to set up. I'm not sure if there's a per-request charge or not. I wouldn't be surprised either way.