Crypto Payment Gateway Fees: What You Actually Pay (2026)

Hello everyone, today we will talk about crypto payment gateway fees. Not the number on the pricing page — the number that actually leaves your account.

One of the reasons merchants move to crypto payments in the first place is to escape card processing costs. Then they pick a gateway advertising 0.5%, and a few months later the ledger does not agree with the marketing page. Nobody lied to them. They just read one number out of four.

This article is the breakdown we wish someone had given us: every layer, where it comes from, and why the whole stack disappears when nobody is holding your money.

The number on the pricing page is the smallest number you will pay

Here is what the major cryptocurrency payment gateway providers publish, as of July 2026:

• NOWPayments: 0.5% service fee for mono-currency payments. 1% for multi-currency, fixed-rate, or fee-paid-by-user payments.
• CoinGate: a flat 1% per transaction.
• BitPay: 1–2% + 25¢ per transaction, tiered on monthly volume. Their own pricing announcement is specific about who pays what: merchants under $500,000 per month pay the 2% + 25¢ tier. The 1% tier starts above $1,000,000 monthly.

That BitPay detail is worth sitting with, because “1–2%” reads as if you might land anywhere in the range. In practice, if you are a normal WooCommerce store, you are at 2% + 25¢. The 1% is for merchants doing a million dollars a month. It is a real rate. It is just not your rate.

But even the correct percentage is only layer one of four.

Where your money actually stops

To understand the fee stack you have to understand the route. In a custodial or semi-custodial gateway, your customer’s money does not travel from their wallet to yours. It travels through a building.

NOWPayments documents their own non-custodial flow with admirable clarity, so let us use it. The customer sends funds to a one-time deposit address, paying a network fee from their own wallet. Those funds then move to the provider’s internal processing — that is a second on-chain transaction, with a second network fee. The processing takes the service commission. Then the funds are paid out to your wallet — a third on-chain transaction, third network fee.

Their documentation totals it plainly: three network fees, one covered by the user and two charged from the deposit, plus the service commission.

Three blockchain transactions for one purchase. Your customer clicked “pay” once.

Every stop on that route exists because someone other than you is holding the money in between. Remove the middle, and two of those three network fees have nowhere to come from.

The four fees nobody puts in the table

1. The service fee

The published percentage. This is the one everybody compares, and the only one anybody markets. It is also usually the smallest.

2. The conversion fee

If a customer pays in ETH and you want BTC, or you want to settle in fiat, somebody has to swap it — and swapping is not free. NOWPayments’ rate doubles from 0.5% to 1% the moment a payment is multi-currency, fixed-rate, or has fee-paid-by-user enabled. If you want fiat out, their published fiat withdrawal range is 1.5%–2.3%.

That last number deserves emphasis. The gateway you chose for its “0.5%” can charge you up to 2.3% on the way out, which is worse than the credit card processing you were trying to escape.

3. The network fees — plural

This is the layer that never appears in a comparison table, because it is not the gateway’s to charge. It is real anyway.

Network fees are not a percentage. They are a flat cost per on-chain transaction, set by the network and its congestion. Which means two things: they scale with how many hops your money makes, and they hurt small orders disproportionately.

BitPay handles this in a way that is worth knowing about if you use them. Because they consolidate payments before converting to fiat, they pay miners to confirm it — and they pass that on as a separate “Network Cost” line item charged to the purchaser at checkout, using Bitcoin Core’s conservative 2-block fee estimate. It fluctuates with congestion. Your customer sees a price, then sees a bigger price.

Refunds have their own version. BitPay’s support documentation states that when you issue a refund, the miner fee is deducted from your merchant ledger balance as a separate entry. A returned order costs you money that has nothing to do with the order.

4. The payout fee

The one that turns a good rate into a bad one at low volume.

CoinGate’s 1% is genuinely transparent, and for EU merchants their MiCA licence is a real credential. But look at the payout layer in their published pricing: a standard payout is €0.50 + 0.5%. A fiat conversion payout is €0.50 + up to 1.5%. A SWIFT withdrawal carries 0.5% with a €50 minimum. Payouts are weekly by default.

For a store with a €60 average order and modest volume, those fixed charges can rival the transaction fee itself — and the weekly schedule means your cash sits in someone else’s account until they are ready.

Minimums: the fee that hits your smallest orders hardest

There is a fifth cost that is not a fee at all: the floor.

NOWPayments states in their own FAQ that the minimum payment amount is roughly $2 for about half the coins they support and $3–5 for the rest. Their help centre gives a worked example: BTC to USDT-TRC20 has a minimum of about 0.0001203 BTC, roughly $12.50. Payments below the minimum simply will not process, and their documentation notes some blockchains require higher minimums because of gas.

If you sell a $9 digital product, that pair is not a bad deal for you. It is not available to you.

And there is the underpayment trap underneath it. NOWPayments’ own docs are candid: when a customer’s wallet or exchange deducts its own commission on sending, the resulting shortfall is not accounted for by the gateway, and it is entirely on the user’s side. Which is technically true and operationally meaningless — because “the user’s side” is a support ticket in your inbox, from your customer, about your checkout.

To be fair: why custodial gateways have to take a cut

We should be honest here, because a page that only attacks is not worth trusting.

Custodial gateways are not taking your money for nothing. They are paying for real things: KYC and AML compliance, licensing in multiple jurisdictions, custody infrastructure and the insurance around it, exchange liquidity to convert at a locked rate, fiat banking rails, 24/7 support, and a legal team. CoinGate’s MiCA licence is not a marketing line — it costs money, and for some merchants it is exactly what they need to sleep at night.

The percentage is the price of that service. It is a fair price for what it is.

The question is not whether they deserve it. The question is whether you need it. Because every one of those costs exists to solve a problem created by the same decision: somebody else is holding your money.

The non-custodial route: one hop, one fee

Now delete the building.

The customer connects their wallet at checkout and sends funds directly to your address. On-chain, peer-to-peer, one transaction. Confirmed, order complete.

Count the fees:

• Service fee: none — there is nobody in the middle to charge one.
• Conversion fee: none — nothing was converted.
• Network fees: one, paid by the customer, same as any wallet transfer they make.
• Payout fee: none — there is no payout. The money is already in your wallet.
• Minimum: whatever the network allows. Nobody sets a floor for you.

One hop. One fee. And it was not yours.

How 0% actually works

We build CryptoPay, so read this with that in mind.

CryptoPay is a WordPress plugin, not a service. You buy a licence once. We never see a transaction, never hold a coin, and never take a percentage — not because we are generous, but because the architecture gives us no place to stand. The payment goes from your customer’s wallet to yours. We are not on the route.

That also removes KYC, because there is no account to verify. No dashboard to lock. No provider deciding which assets you may accept, and no provider that can decide next year that your business model no longer fits their strategy. If you want to see how that last one plays out in practice, we wrote about what happened to Coinbase Commerce.

Here is the whole stack side by side:

Figures from each provider’s published documentation, July 2026. Fees change — check the source before you commit.

Your WooCommerce crypto payment gateway ships by default, and CryptoPay integrates with 16+ other WordPress plugins. All EVM networks are supported out of the box, with network add-ons for Bitcoin, Solana, Tron, TON, XRP Ledger and Sui.

One tip on that single remaining network fee: it is not fixed by us or by anyone. If it matters for your average order size, enable a cheap chain. Tron, Solana and TON cost a fraction of Ethereum mainnet, and since your customer pays it, a cheap network is a conversion optimisation, not just a cost one.

Your prices also stay in your currency. Conversion at checkout runs through your choice of rate source — CoinGecko, CoinMarketCap, Moralis, Raydium or Open Exchange — reading a rate, not touching your money.

WooCommerce Cryptocurrency Payment Gateway for WordPress by CryptoPay

When a custodial gateway is still the right answer

Non-custodial is not free of trade-offs, and pretending otherwise would make this article the same kind of marketing page we just spent this whole article taking apart.

Use a custodial gateway if:

• You need fiat in your bank account automatically. Non-custodial means crypto lands in your wallet. If you need EUR on Tuesday, someone has to convert and wire it, and that someone charges for it. That is a fair trade.
• You are regulated and need a licensed counterparty. For some EU merchants, a MiCA-licensed provider is not a preference, it is a requirement.
• You genuinely need 350 coins. If your customers pay in long-tail altcoins across chains nobody has heard of, an aggregator earns its cut.
• You want someone to blame. A support line you can call has value. Self-custody means the buck stops with you.

If none of those describe you — and for most WooCommerce stores, none of them do — you are paying for a service you are not using.

Final thoughts

The uncomfortable part of the fee conversation is not that gateways charge too much. It is that the fee is a symptom, not the disease.

Every layer we walked through — the service percentage, the conversion spread, the extra network hops, the payout charge, the minimum, the fiat withdrawal — exists for exactly one reason. Your customer’s money went somewhere before it came to you. Every stop costs. The percentage is just the rent on the building.

You do not negotiate the rent down. You stop renting.

If you want to see what a checkout looks like when nothing sits between your customer’s wallet and yours, the Lite version is free on WordPress.org and takes about five minutes to set up. Send yourself a test order on a cheap network and watch the exact amount arrive.

That number — the one that arrives — is the only fee table that matters.

CryptoPay

More crypto payment gateway comparisons: CryptAPI Alternatives, Pay With MetaMask Alternatives, Speed Alternatives, and all our plugins.