What Accepting Crypto Payments Costs, Fully Counted
Provider fee, conversion margin, settlement charges and the support hours. The components and how to compare them.
Crypto payment acceptance is quoted as a single percentage. The total involves at least four components and they do not appear together on any pricing page. We measured against crypto acquiring for businesses, which states the components separately rather than as a blended number.
Component one: the stated fee
The visible percentage. Typically 0.5 to 1.5 percent for a guaranteed fiat amount, declining with volume.
Compressed by competition to a narrow band among serious providers, which makes it the least discriminating comparison.
Component two: the conversion margin
Between the crypto received and the fiat settled.
Frequently not on the pricing page and frequently larger than the stated fee. A provider quoting 0.5 percent and applying a 0.9 percent conversion margin costs more than one quoting 1.2 percent all-in.
Ask for it in writing. A provider that quotes a fee and will not quote the margin has separated the disclosed part from the expensive part.
Component three: settlement charges
Per payout, which is negligible at weekly settlement and meaningful at daily.
Worth checking before changing settlement frequency for working capital reasons, because the arithmetic can reverse.
Component four: support hours
Not a fee and the largest variable between providers.
Underpayment handling, expired payment policy, wrong-network recovery and refund mechanics determine how many hours a month this takes. For online retail specifically, ecommerce payment solutions with crypto settlement is where the comparison lands.
Measured across providers, the difference in support load is larger in cost terms than the difference in stated fees.
The comparison that works
Ask each provider what a specific example payment costs end to end: a hundred unit order, in this asset, settled to an account in this currency.
The figure they give should match what is deducted. Providers that quote all-in and match are worth a small premium for the predictability alone.
The price risk model, which is not a fee
Whether the fiat amount is guaranteed from the payment request or determined at confirmation.
For a merchant with fixed prices, the guarantee is worth more than the fee difference between any two serious providers. A single adverse move on a large order can exceed a month of fee savings.
Against cards
For a standard merchant, crypto acceptance saves perhaps a percentage point on the share of customers who use it, which is modest.
For a merchant in a category priced punitively, the comparison is not fee against fee but against an effective cost several times higher once disputes and reserves are counted. The cost that only appears on a bad day is the absence of support, and whether a regulated crypto exchange exists is worth establishing.
The calculation is specific to your own book and it takes an afternoon.
Fees move with network demand. Any figure here reflects the date shown above and should be re-checked before you act on it. Where a measurement was taken by hand, the article says so.