You pay on what you draw, not on the limit.
A term loan hands you the whole amount at once and charges you on all of it from day one. A line of credit works the opposite way: you get a committed limit, draw part of it when you need cash, and pay only on the drawn balance while the rest sits available at no charge. As you repay, that room opens back up to draw again, closer to how a business credit card behaves than how a loan does. Because the charge follows the drawn balance, the cost of a line is not fixed by its headline number; it moves with how much you draw and how fast you pay it back. Everything else on this page follows from that.
Two quoting conventionsThe same product, quoted two ways.
Banks, credit unions, and SBA CAPLines (the SBA’s revolving line-of-credit program) quote an APR, usually as prime plus a margin on the drawn balance, with a flat annual fee and no draw fee, so a Wells Fargo line reads as something like Prime plus 1.75 percent up to Prime plus 9.75 percent. Fintech lines quote in a different language: a weekly fee per draw (Fundbox at 4.66 percent), a monthly fee charged on the original principal (American Express, cumulative 3 to 27 percent over the term), a simple-interest number (Bluevine starting at 7.80 percent), or a per-draw factor (National Funding around 1.1), and they disclose an APR only when a disclosure law forces it. At the subprime edge the line begins to look like a merchant cash advance: some online lines are quoted in MCA-style factor language, and one aggregator renders OnDeck as a 1.06 factor even though OnDeck itself quotes an APR. Line-of-credit and advance pricing blur right there. Until two offers are both expressed as an all-in APR on the drawn balance, they cannot be compared.
Two channelsTwo price worlds under one name.
Lender channel, not credit score, is the dominant price axis. The realized prices cluster in two places, a bank world in the high single digits and an online world in the mid-50s, roughly a sixfold gap. A thin middle band exists at the advertised level, from SBA CAPLines and credit unions up through marketplace lines, but it is read into the nearer of the two worlds rather than treated as a third. These two envelopes are never blended.
Bank and SBA
Quoted as an APR, and the lowest all-in cost. The all-in APR here runs roughly 7 to 16.5 percent, with an SBA CAPLine sub-band of about 9.75 to 13.25 percent inside the top. Limits are larger, the qualification bar is higher, and the line revolves under a periodic bank review. Market data, not a Trident quote.
Online and fintech
Usually fee-native: the cost is quoted as a weekly fee, a monthly fee on the original principal, a simple-interest number, or a factor, with an APR disclosed only when a law forces it. Once every fee is converted, the realized center lands in the mid-50s, far above the advertised floors these lenders show. Market data, not a Trident quote.
The advertised floor sits well below what most borrowers pay.
The cleanest example in the public record is OnDeck. Its own transparency disclosure puts the average APR on the lines of credit it originated in the first half of 2025 at 56.6 percent, while the same class of fintech line advertises floors like Bluevine’s “starting at 7.80 percent.” A borrower who reads the teaser and lands near the realized average pays roughly seven times the floor. This is the rule, not a single outlier: an advertised starting number selects the strongest possible file, and most files are not that file.
Channel beats scoreWhere you borrow outweighs your credit.
The same borrower can be priced near 8.5 percent at a bank and near 55 percent online. When a batch of these online term and line-of-credit loans was bundled and sold to investors, the borrowers in it averaged a 723 credit score, which is prime credit. Those prime borrowers still paid about 44.4 percent a year, because the loans came from online lenders. Credit tier moves your price inside a channel, but it does not move you between channels. Which door you walk through sets the range before your score adjusts it.
The fee layerThe charges that hide beside the APR.
A line of credit carries a fee layer a term loan does not, and it is where fintech cost hides. The most line-specific charge is the draw fee, commonly 2 to 3 percent of each amount you withdraw, which re-incurs on every draw rather than once, so a line you tap often costs more than the same line tapped once. Alongside it sits a flat annual fee in the bank world, and in the fintech world a monthly fee calculated on the original principal you borrowed rather than the balance you have left. None of these show up in a bare APR quote, so ask for each one by name and read the all-in APR on the drawn balance, not the headline.
The historical driftCheaper than a term loan, until it was not.
A line of credit was not always this expensive relative to a term loan. Before 2020, OnDeck’s own realized line-of-credit APR ran around 32 to 35 percent, roughly 13 points below its term-loan APR, so a line was the cheaper instrument of the two. Since then the online line has risen about 22 points to the mid-50s and converged up to the term-loan level, erasing that gap. The lesson is that the line-is-cheaper relationship is not permanent, so it is worth checking on today’s numbers rather than assuming it from how the products used to price.
Every figure on this page is general US market data as of Jul 2026, not Trident pricing and not an offer. It is here so you can sanity-check a quote against typical ranges. Any real offer, and the partner paperwork behind it, governs. This page is education, not legal or financial advice.