Embedding real banking — accounts, cards, payments, sometimes lending — directly into a software product used to mean either partnering with a bank yourself or spending a year on compliance before shipping anything. Treasury Prime and Unit both exist to compress that timeline down to an API integration, but they solve it with different architectures: one gives you a network of banks to choose from, the other gives you one comprehensive platform with a managed shortcut built in.
Treasury Prime
Treasury Prime is a banking-as-a-service API that connects fintechs and platforms to a network of US sponsor banks, rather than locking you into a single banking relationship. You get virtual ledger accounts and ACH, wire and real-time payments through one API, plus a developer sandbox to test before your regulatory go-live.
Pricing: Enterprise, custom-quoted based on transaction volume and feature set — requires a demo and sales conversation, no public numbers.
Strengths: access to 20+ sponsor banks instead of single-bank lock-in, $10B+ in deposits and 2.5M+ accounts already facilitated across bank partners, and a sandbox that lets you build and test before the compliance clock starts.
Limits: no public pricing at all, it only makes sense if you actually need regulated banking rails rather than just payment processing, and coordinating with a sponsor-bank network is inherently slower to launch than a plain payments API.
Unit
Unit packages banking, cards and lending as features you build directly into your app, offered two ways: a fast "managed" package for teams that want to move quickly, or a fully custom API for teams that want to control every detail themselves.
Pricing: Quote-only — there's no public pricing page (it 404s), and every deal goes through a sales demo regardless of which deployment model you pick.
Strengths: proven at scale with $100B+ in annual transaction volume and 15M+ daily API calls, 2M+ end users served, a full suite of financial products (accounts, payments, cards, lending) on one platform, and the managed "Ready-to-Launch" option for teams that don't want to build the full stack themselves.
Limits: zero public pricing information anywhere, which makes early-stage evaluation harder, and every path runs through an enterprise sales cycle rather than a self-serve signup.
Side-by-side
| Treasury Prime | Unit | |
|---|---|---|
| Core model | API layer across a network of 20+ sponsor banks | Single comprehensive platform, managed or custom API |
| Scale proof | $10B+ deposits, 2.5M+ accounts | $100B+ annual volume, 2M+ end users, 15M+ daily API calls |
| Deployment options | API only, sandbox for pre-launch testing | Managed (fast) or fully custom API |
| Pricing | Custom quote, volume + features | Custom quote, no public page at all |
| Best for | Teams wanting bank-network flexibility, not locked to one sponsor | Teams wanting a fast managed path or a full product suite on one platform |
Other options in the same space
If your market is Europe rather than the US, Swan is built specifically for that — real IBANs across 5 European countries, a free unlimited sandbox, and white-label branding, though its entry paid tier starts at €2,990/month and it doesn't go beyond Europe. If you need Canadian coverage specifically, Synctera is the one BaaS platform on this list built to support the Canadian market alongside the US, with the same quote-only, no-public-pricing pattern as Treasury Prime and Unit.
Verdict
Pick Treasury Prime if: you want the flexibility of multiple sponsor banks rather than being tied to one institution's risk appetite and pricing.
Pick Unit if: you want the broadest single-platform feature set — accounts, cards, and lending together — with a managed option to launch faster if you don't want to build everything yourself.
None of the three major US players (Treasury Prime, Unit, Synctera) publish pricing, so the real comparison only starts once you're in a sales conversation with real volume numbers — budget for that cycle before assuming either platform fits your unit economics.