Offering visas under your own brand without writing code is a real product category. What you buy is a hosted, co-branded storefront on a subdomain you control, styled in your colours and run by a provider who files the applications with governments and answers the traveler when something goes wrong. Setting one up is configuration, not development: upload a logo, choose a colour, point a DNS record at the provider, sign a commercial agreement.
What "no code" actually means
The phrase gets used loosely, so here is the concrete version. The provider hosts the whole application flow at visas.yourbrand.com. Your job is to send travelers there and make the link easy to find: a navigation item, a line in the booking confirmation, a card on the manage-my-booking screen, a paragraph in the pre-departure email you already send.
What you do not do:
- No API integration. There is no endpoint to call, no keys to rotate, no version upgrades to schedule.
- No forms to build. Application forms change country by country, and keeping them current is the provider's standing job.
- No passport data in your systems. Travelers upload documents directly to the provider, so there is nothing new for your compliance team to sign off.
- No government portals. Submission, follow-up, and the retry when a portal goes down all happen on the provider's side.
What remains is marketing work: where the link sits, how you describe it, when the reminder goes out. That work matters more than the setup does, because a storefront nobody can find converts at zero.
The white-label spectrum, honestly
"White label" covers two arrangements with very different economics, and providers are not always clear about which one they are selling.
Co-branded hosted storefront
Your brand carries the page: logo, colours, typeface, domain. The traveler pays on the provider's payment account, which makes the provider the merchant of record, so their legal name appears on the card statement and the receipt. That is a card-network rule about naming the seller, and it applies to every provider in the category. Any free plan that promises a completely invisible supplier is either glossing over this or planning to break it.
In exchange, the provider carries what being merchant of record implies: chargebacks, refunds, payment compliance, and the support conversation that follows a refused or delayed application. Setup is measured in hours, and there is usually no fee to start.
Full white label
Payments run through your own gateway. You are the merchant of record, your name is on the statement, you set the retail price, and the provider disappears from the traveler's view entirely. This is a licence with a monthly minimum drawn down per application, because the provider is giving up the service-fee margin that funds the free version. It also moves refunds, chargebacks and first-line traveler support onto your team. At volume the maths works well. As a first experiment it is an expensive way to test demand.
Where the money comes from
On the co-branded model you take a share of the service fee charged on each application, usually on volume-based terms. There is no cost of goods, because you are monetising traffic you already have at the moment travelers discover they need a document. To size it, take the share of your bookings heading to destinations with a visa or travel-authorisation requirement and apply a conservative attach rate.
When you are the merchant of record, you pay a wholesale or per-application rate and set your own retail price, so your margin is the spread you choose. In both models the consular fee should be passed through separately at cost, and a provider that marks it up quietly is charging your customers twice.
What to check in any provider
- Who supports the traveler. Ask who answers "where is my visa" at 2am, in which languages, and whether that conversation lands back in your inbox.
- Who handles refusals and refunds. Governments refuse applications. Find out what the traveler is told, who issues the refund, and whether your brand is exposed to the chargeback.
- Whether consular fees are marked up. Ask for a worked example of one application: consular fee, service fee, your share. If the breakdown is vague, that is the answer.
- How fast a storefront goes live. Same-day setup is achievable. Multi-week onboarding for a branded page usually signals manual work behind the scenes.
- Coverage and transit handling. Check the destination list against where you actually sell, and confirm that connecting stops are assessed too.
Which route fits your business
If you run a content site, a tour operation, a travel agency or an agency network, the hosted storefront is almost certainly right. You get a working product this week, no engineering budget, and a revenue line you can measure before committing further.
If you run a platform with engineers and a booking flow you control end to end, you may outgrow the hosted route. Once the visa step belongs inside your checkout rather than one click away from it, drop-in components such as Elements or a full API integration start to pay for themselves. We compare the two paths in API vs white-label app: which visa integration model suits you. Launch hosted, measure the attach rate, and integrate when volume justifies the engineering time.
How this works at SimpleVisa
The co-branded storefront comes with the account, with no sales call and no setup fee. You design it in the brand studio on the hosted storefront page, publish to your own subdomain, and it can be live the same day. SimpleVisa is merchant of record, charges a $39 service fee on top of the consular fee, passes consular fees through at cost, and shares that service fee with you. Requirement data covers 190+ destinations, with 80+ processed end to end. Full white label, where your gateway takes the payment and your name is on the statement, runs on the Platform licence at $5,000 per month drawn down against $12 per application; the terms for both models are on the pricing page.