What are the Bitpay alternatives you recommend?
My consulting company is helping non-profits add Bitcoin to their accepted list of payment methods.<p>We plan to add BitPay for them, but we also need a backup method in case, BitPay fails. Our gateway routing infra is already in place, so it will be trivial to route payment request elsewhere incase of downtimes.
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1. Blockonomics — Be your own bank<p>Pros: Blockonomics is aligned well with the Bitcoin philosophy and is a permissionless, Direct to wallet payment gateway. Transactions are charged a cheap 1% fee for unlimited transactions, with your first 10 transactions are free. They also accept numerous cryptocurrencies using a built-in integration with Shapeshift. Blockonomics is also a leader in segwit adoption in bitcoin space — making it a must if you’re having trouble with customers unhappy with high miner fee. Payments go direct to your own wallet too — letting you own your Bitcoins instead of holding it at an exchange.<p>Cons: Blockonomics does not allow for instant fiat conversion upon payment delivery, meaning you’ll have to send it to your local bank manually.<p>2. CoinGate — Fiat friendly<p>Pros: CoinGate holds a similar fee structure at 1% transaction fee for as many transactions as you’d like. Similar to Blockonomics, they do allow you to accept 50+ cryptocurrencies beyond Bitcoin using Shapeshift. CoinGate merchants are also Segwit compatible for optimal mining fees and speed. Also, incoming Bitcoins can be converted to fiat in real-time.<p>Cons: Payments you’ve received are held in CoinGate’s wallet until you‘re ready to transfer them out.<p>3. BtcPay — BitPay’s bandaid<p>Pros: Since Bitpay appears to have an excessively long cons list, BtcPay has arrived to help solve some of those inefficiencies. BtcPay is a layer over Bitpay using their invoice API — which is super simple to migrate to for existing Bitpay users. BtcPay also makes purchases Segwit ready, and is built on an open source platform. Their support efforts are also top notch.<p>Cons: While it fixes many of the problems that Bitpay users face, they are experiencing a low adoption rate. Mainly because it still requires you to setup/manage your own bitcoin node. Setup is technical and require installation of several libraries/packages, though the founder Nicolas Dorier is very helpful. Not for the weak hearted !<p>4. CoinPayments — Cheaper than your average<p>Pros: Proving one of the lowest transaction fees, Coinpayments offers a 0.5% transaction fee to merchants. They also allow direct conversion to fiat from over 100 cryptocurrencies. Plus, they’re Segwit compatible.<p>Cons: Like most payment processors, your incoming Bitcoins are held by in their wallet — with an additional transaction fee if you’re looking to send it to your personal wallet. Also, support appears to be lacking for some of their merchants with inquiries.<p>5.PayBear — The new Kid on the block<p>Pros: PayBear is relatively new in the space with the pulic beta being out recently in Oct’17. They have a good eye for design and the UI is easy on the eyes. Unlike Blockonomics, their payment system is not direct to wallet. They have some pretty interesting introductory offers up for grabs and they also support multiple currencies.<p>Cons: API integrations are still not released and only supports Woocommerce, prestashop and Opencart at the moment. They have plans to introduce crypto to crypto conversions in future but is not available as of now. Funds from customer’s wallet are sent to Paybear which is then sent to merchant’s wallet, this is a security risk and adds extra network costs for payment forwarding