Crypto-only billing: the numbers behind the decision

As of last week you cannot pay us with a card. The decision reads like a positioning statement and it was not one — it was arithmetic that had been getting worse for eighteen months. Since we are going to be asked about it in every sales conversation from now on, here are the actual numbers.

What card processing cost us

The reserve is the line that hurts. Fifteen per cent of every top-up held for six months, on a business whose working capital goes straight back out to upstream pools, is a permanent loan to your acquirer at an interest rate of zero. At our 2021 volume that was roughly €48,000 sitting in someone else's account at any moment.

Chargebacks on an eleven-cent product

Our chargeback rate on card top-ups was 0.9 % of transactions. The card schemes' monitoring threshold is 0.9 %. We were not near the line; we were on it, every month, and the second and third terminations both cited it.

The composition is what makes it structural. Sixty-one per cent of disputes were filed as "services not received". We can show a card scheme an activation id, a timestamp, a phone number and the text of the delivered SMS. None of that is evidence a scheme can weigh, because none of it ties to the cardholder. We won 12 % of disputes. The remaining 88 % cost us the top-up, a €20 dispute fee, and a mark against the ratio — on a product where the average purchase inside that balance is eleven cents.

There is also a genuine fraud share we should not pretend away. Some proportion of those top-ups were made with cards that did not belong to the person spending the balance. A prepaid, instantly-consumable digital product is attractive for exactly that, and no amount of 3DS made it go away.

What crypto costs

• Processor fee between 0.4 % and 1 % depending on the asset, against 4.9 %–5.4 % plus reserve.
• No chargebacks. A confirmed payment is final, which cuts both ways and we will come back to that.
• Settlement in minutes rather than T+7 with a rolling reserve behind it.
• Support load down. Payment tickets were 31 % of our volume in the first half of 2021. They are now mostly "my invoice expired", which has a two-line answer.

What it costs in customers

This is the part that gets left out of posts like this. Signup to first top-up conversion was 34 % on cards. In the first month of crypto-only it was 21 %. It has recovered to 29 % as we improved the flow, and we do not expect it to reach 34 % again. That is a real, permanent loss of about one customer in seven, and they are disproportionately the small individual users rather than the teams.

We took it because the alternative was not "keep cards". The alternative was a fourth high-risk acquirer at a worse rate, a bigger reserve, and another termination in nine months, with the top-up system going down each time.

What we did to soften it

1. Invoices are priced in EUR and the crypto amount is locked for twenty minutes. You are never exposed to a price move between clicking and confirming.
2. Underpayments are credited, not lost. If you send €28.40 against a €30.00 invoice, €28.40 lands on your balance and the invoice stays open for the difference. This is the single most common thing that goes wrong and it should not cost anyone money.
3. Overpayments credit in full. There is no rounding in our favour.
4. Minimum first top-up €30.00, then €10.00. Higher than we would like, but network fees make a €3 top-up absurd, and we would rather set a floor than watch someone pay €1.80 in fees to add €3.
5. The balance never expires and is not tied to a subscription. If crypto-only means you top up less often, at least the money keeps.

Would we take cards again

If an acquirer offered a stable rate without a rolling reserve, yes, alongside crypto. We are not attached to the position. But the dispute mechanics are unchanged since 2021: our product is cheap, instant and impossible to evidence to a scheme, and that is the property that made this a losing product on cards. Nobody has offered since, and we have stopped asking.