India's UPI, which has been free for merchants, will impose a 0.4% merchant fee on certain payments above ₹2,000, or $21, from October 15 in a major shift (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)

India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) will start charging merchants a 0.4% fee on certain payments above ₹2,000, or about $21, from October 15. This change, according to TechCrunch, marks a significant shift for the digital payments network, which has been free for merchants to accept since its introduction.

The fee, capped at ₹300 for transactions of ₹75,000 or more, will not apply to payments of ₹2,000 or less, nor to small merchants receiving up to ₹100,000 a month through UPI. Consumers will continue to use the service for free.

The National Payments Corporation of India, which operates the network, introduced the change to make the system financially self-sustaining, as it handles billions of payments each month. The move had been anticipated by the payments industry, which had argued that the zero-fee model made it difficult to cover the growing cost of operating the network.

Brief written by urgent.news from Techmeme, TechCrunch — 2 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.