Cost by payment rail
Total monthly cost for each rail at your entered volume, with dollars and percent saved versus card processing (the baseline). The cheapest rail is highlighted.
| Rail | Total cost | Effective rate | Saved vs card ($) | Saved vs card (%) |
|---|
How it works
Every rail here reduces to the same question: what does it cost to move your customer's money into a form you can use? Card processing bundles interchange (paid to the customer's issuing bank), the card network's assessment fee (Visa/Mastercard's cut for running the rails), the acquirer's own markup, and a chargeback reserve the processor holds back because card payments can be reversed by the customer's bank up to 120+ days later — that reversibility is a real service (it protects buyers from fraud and non-delivery) and merchants pay for it whether or not they ever get a chargeback. Stablecoin processors like BitPay, Coinbase Commerce, and B2BINPAY strip out the card network and issuing-bank layers entirely — you're paying mainly for checkout infrastructure, invoice matching, and (usually) a bundled off-ramp to fiat, which is why their flat rates land well below card rates even before volume discounts. Direct wallet-to-wallet on a cheap L2 skips the processor too: you're paying only blockchain gas, which is fractions of a cent per transfer. But that number is deceptive on its own — if your business needs dollars, not a stablecoin balance, converting back to fiat requires an off-ramp, and that off-ramp fee (not the gas fee) is the real cost of the "direct" route once you actually need to spend the money. This calculator adds that off-ramp cost back in when you toggle it on, so the direct-wallet number you see is honest about what going fiat-to-fiat actually costs, not just what moving the token costs.
Reading the comparison
At $500,000/month and a $250 average ticket (2,000 transactions), card processing at 2.9% + $0.30/tx + a 0.75% chargeback reserve runs about $18,850/month. A BitPay-style processor at 1% cuts that to $5,000 — roughly 73% cheaper. A leaner processor like B2BINPAY at 0.35% brings it down to $1,750, over 90% cheaper. Direct wallet-to-wallet with no off-ramp is essentially free at $10/month in gas — but that's only real if you're comfortable holding stablecoins indefinitely. Turn the off-ramp toggle on at a typical 0.5% and the same direct route costs $2,510/month, since the off-ramp fee applies to your full volume, not just gas — still about 87% cheaper than cards, but a very different number from "$10." The takeaway: the off-ramp fee, not the network fee, is usually what decides whether "accepting crypto directly" is actually cheap once your business needs fiat.