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Seeking advice on Accepting Crypto Payments - is it worth it?
Hey folks,
I’ve had a few customers recently ask if we can accept crypto payments for hosting and VPS services. I’m open to the idea, but I’ve got some reservations—mainly around high network fees and the volatility of crypto itself. I know BitPay has been around for a while and offers automatic fiat conversion (which is a must for us—GBP ideally), but I’m looking for alternatives that are actively accepting new signups.
A couple things I’m trying to figure out:
* Best gateway for GBP payouts – I’d prefer something that settles in GBP directly or at least lets me withdraw to GBP via bank or exchange.
* Low network fees – BTC and ETH are brutal during peak times. Would love something that supports stablecoins or Layer 2 options.
I’ve looked at NOWPayments, CoinPayments, and Paycio so far. NOWPayments seems promising with multi-coin support and fiat conversion, but I’d love to hear from anyone who’s actually using these in production as some of the information on their websites seem incomplete.
If you’re accepting crypto, what’s working for you? Any horror stories or success tips? is it worth it? Also curious if anyone’s tried OpenNode or TripleA for GBP settlement.
Cheers in advance,
Comments
For btc/ltc and some other coins you can have self-hosted solutions like:
https://docs.btcpayserver.org
As BitPay alternative:
https://coinify.com
https://cryptomus.com/
See "Best gateway for GBP payouts".
But, yeah:
https://coingate.com/
https://www.coinify.com/
Not sure if they do GBP withdraws specifically, but I know they do FIAT.
Better pick a self host payment wall that doesn't required to customer sign contract
Imagine your server get hacked and customer wallet drained in second
I use coinpayments and have had a lot of issues with them, but generally they are good and their support is really fast.
Sometimes you have to force the support members to reply with something they wrote themselves and not a canned response, but it’s generally good.
But most of the customers that cause abuse pay with crypto, but it’s not that bad to the the point where I don’t want to accept it anymore.
@VM6
We ran into the same problem – customers asking for crypto, but gateways either had high fees.
In the end we created SHKeeper, a self-hosted non-custodial processor. SHKeeper offers a direct way to receive BTC, ETH, LTC, DOGE, XMR, XRP, TRX, BNB, SOL, MATIC, AVAX, USDT (ERC20, TRC20, BEP-20, Polygon, Avalanche), USDC (ERC20, TRC20, BEP-20, Polygon, Avalanche). SO you get payments directly to your own wallets – no middleman, no KYC, no extra fees. Can be handled exchange API.
If it’s interesting, I can share more details or answer specific questions here or via DM.
It’s also open source, so you can take a look yourself: https://github.com/vsys-host/shkeeper.io
Oxapay or cryptomus
To get it into your bank just use any exchange and withdraw from there
We use BTCPayServer which does a great job. We accept Bitcoin, Bitcoin Lightning, Monero and Litecoin. It also has the option for swaps so customers can pay nearly with every cryptocurrency and we get Monero.
There is also Bitcart.ai which is also very nice.
Both are self hosted solutions.
Regarding converting back to GBP shitcoins. No clue as we don't have any fiat accounts
Curious, who has the best WHMCS module support?
cryptomus
Probably not worth it
By the way
We built a free, ready-made WHMCS module for our open-source processor SHKeeper.
https://github.com/vsys-host/whmcs-shkeeper-gateway-module
https://marketplace.whmcs.com/product/6483-shkeeper
It lets to accept crypto directly (and be a processor yourself), and the module handles the invoices/payments flow automatically.
We also wrote modules for a few other popular CMSs to make crypto acceptance easier and more accessible. It’s all open source and free to use
Its funny I thought crypto was suppose to remove all these big bank fees and transfer fees. Seems like its turning into the total opposite.
For that you need two things:
1. Use self-custodial solution
2. Not cash out to fiat
Anyway, some transfer fee will be present to pay to a blockchain (which goes to miners or PoS verifier nodes)
If you use commercial exchanges, it sort of goes against the whole point of crypto in the first place, and quite frankly Bitcoin is awful for a daily use "currency" since the fees are often so high unless you don't mind waiting days or longer for your transaction to clear. There is no real benefit to paying for something in crypto if the buyer is using a 3rd party commercial exchange/wallet and using Bitcoin. As much KYC (if not more) than a bank, often higher fees, and your entire transaction from start to finish is public record and not private. If I send you a wire transfer, you don't know how much money I have in the bank and I don't know how much you have, either. I'm not sure why Bitcoin is as popular as it is today, but that's a discussion for another day.
Many providers who "accept crypto" do so in the worst possible way ever, using exchanges that force the end-user to pay by syncing their 3rd party exchange with the payment gateway and making it damn near impossible (or very very inconvenient and difficult) to simply get just the wallet address and total for a manual transaction from a local wallet. I think BitPay does this, which I see many providers use, but at least they give the option to use things like "Bitcoin Core" where you can copy/paste the wallet address instead of doing SSO into your web-based wallet somewhere.
I think Coinbase as a merchant system is probably one of the worst, I don't think you can easily (or at all, maybe) get the wallet address and total. You're forced to pay via a number of third party supported exchanges only if I do recall.
CoinPayments, we used to use, until they stopped allowing US businesses on their platform back in 2021 or 2022 or something. Since then, just went with self-hosted BTCPayServer and it's been much better for us.
I usually try to convert most things to Litecoin since the fees are less and it's more practical for actual daily use. Monero is still king for privacy, though a number of lesser supported and less stable privacy coins exist that virtually no one ever accepts.
Depends on how many transactions there are, usually fees are high during times of volatility when many people buy/sell. Lately fees have been US$0.25-$0.5 for next block (10 minutes) which isn't too bad.
But definitely the fees can be annoying, and they definitely "feel" more annoying for the customer because they're paid by the payer not the payee. Credit cards, the business might even be paying a higher fee e.g. 3.5%+fixed fee of like $0.40, but they absorb the cost so the price doesn't seem higher to the customer like it can with crypto.
Lightning Network might be another option, the only downside is that some amount of on chain BTC must be "frozen" to be usable within LN
For sure. I just never pay attention to fees until I notice I just paid $20 or something to send $500+ within a reasonable time, when it'd have been cheaper for me to use another method for the same amount. I know there have been a few times I've gotten invoice payment reminders for things I've already paid, only to find that what I sent yesterday still hasn't confirmed. Things like that are annoying, especially when using the suggested fees anyway and it still not being enough for a timely transaction.
I guess my main gripe is the fees are pretty volatile and one day what is a low fee, the next day is a high fee. Some days a payment clears in 30 minutes, other days it takes... days. Which I know can be mitigated by paying more fees, but still.
But then again I'm also paying out the ass for PayPal conversions to EUR and GBP for two upstreams / services that don't accept crypto and our business bank usually imposes a hefty foreign currency fee as well.
The OG Bitcoin is impractical for day to day stuff and low amounts like $10-20 or less. First it takes variable amount of time to confirm, can be couple minutes, can be an hour. But the fees even on the main network aren't that bad when sending higher amount. The better wallets let you pick the fee based in how many blocks should it take to get included and for the 1-2 block target seems to be reasonable unless it's some market spike. I guess using some more modern coins will be cheaper and faster. Also i find it more fair when I know I will be paying the processing fee and from experience can expect how much it will be. Credit card fees are hidden and unfair in the way that the business has to eat the costs of covenience, the price in EU has to be the same for all no matter if they pay cash, bank transfer (nowadays pretty much instant through QR code and zero fees), or CC.
USDT
Bitcoin fees are not that big > @tentor said:
Lightning Network is in reality rarely used because of the endless issues. In the B2B world it doesn't exist, right?
@MannDude Coinbase Commerce is a way better as BitPay because you can use it without to give them your personal details. BitPay is the worst when it comes to a KYC process.
For privacy ANY transparent blockchain is horrible. Bitcoin, Litecoin, any Stablecoin (they can freeze your funds anytime) etc. Monero fixes this.
What is the possibility of adding a Blesta module?
For self hosted payment gateway we use bitcart ( bitcart.ai) which is working great.
We haven’t had requests for the Blesta module before, but now that it has come up, we’ll start working on a module.
Thanks for raising it.
The estimate is +-2 weeks
How did you configure swap to monero? For me it always defaulted BTC, no matter what I did (I was trying to set it to USDT).
We use the TrocadorApp plugin for BTCPayServer. With this plugin you can set a receiving wallet (Default wallet to receive:) which must be configured on BTCPayServer.
Go for cryptomus