How crypto card fees work: funding, cards and spending

The whole fee schedule, on one screen

Most card comparisons make you assemble the price from four pages. Here is the entire thing, and it is short enough that the interesting part is how much of it says nothing.

Three lines in that table take money. Everything else is there to tell you that a charge you were looking for does not exist.

That is not a slogan, it is a property of how the account is built. Money leaves your balance as a charge in exactly three places: the 1% netted off a deposit, the $2 debited when you create a virtual card beyond your first, and the $35 debited when you order a physical one. Each one appears in your history as its own line with its own amount, so the schedule above and your ledger can be checked against each other.

The rest of this guide is about what those three numbers actually mean over a year — and about the fourth number, the 4% paid on your balance, which is the reason a fee table on its own is only half the answer.

The charges that are not there, and why that matters

The fees that make a card expensive are rarely the ones printed on the pricing page. They are the recurring ones, and they are worth naming individually because a card that has none of them behaves differently from one that has any.

• No monthly fee and no tiers. There is one product. You cannot pay more for a better version of it, and there is nothing to cancel.
• No inactivity fee and no expiry. A balance sits there for as long as you leave it. This is the charge that quietly empties dormant prepaid cards, and it is the one we are asked about most.
• No staking requirement. Nothing has to be locked up to unlock a rate or a rebate. The 4% applies to the balance you already hold, from the first day you hold it.
• No minimum balance. There is a floor on a deposit, not on what you keep afterwards.
• No per-payment fee. A payment is a payment, online or at a terminal, whatever the amount.
• No card-management fees. Freezing, unfreezing, renaming, changing a monthly cap and deleting are all free and unlimited.
• No charge for the API. Keys, scopes and 120 requests a minute come with the account.

Two costs are real and are honestly not ours to remove, so they belong here rather than in a footnote.

The network's own fee on your deposit. Sending crypto costs whatever the chain charges to move it, and that is paid to the chain before the money ever reaches us. It varies by coin, by network and by the hour, which is why no number for it is printed anywhere on this site — and why the choice of network is often worth more than the choice of card. It is the whole subject of the guide on picking the right network.

What the merchant does. Your balance is in dollars; a purchase in another currency is converted at the point of sale exactly as it is on any other card, and some merchants add their own surcharge. Neither of those is a line in our schedule, and neither is something we can quote for you.

The 1% comes out of the deposit, not on top of it

This is the single most common misreading of the schedule, and it changes the arithmetic in the direction people do not expect.

The 1% is taken from what arrives. Send $100 and your balance goes up by $99.00, not by the $100 you sent. Nothing is ever charged separately, nothing arrives later, and there is no second debit hiding behind the first — the deposit line in your history shows the gross amount and the fee that came out of it, side by side.

Which means that if you need an exact figure on the balance, you have to send slightly more than that figure. The multiplication people reach for — add 1% — is very slightly wrong; the correct one is to divide.

1. To have exactly $100 spendable, send $101.02. Not $101.00. The difference is a cent, and it is the difference between a round balance and an awkward one.
2. To cover a physical card order of $35, send $35.36. Same reason. Send exactly $35 and you will be $0.35 short at checkout.
3. In general, divide by 0.99 rather than multiplying by 1.01. On small amounts the two agree to the cent; on four figures they do not.

Two floors apply to the deposit itself, and only to the deposit. Your first top-up has a minimum of $100 — it is the one that activates your free card. Every top-up after that has a minimum of $100. The maximum is $100,000 per deposit request. There is no minimum on the balance you keep afterwards.

One consequence worth stating plainly before you fund anything: value leaves this account as a card payment, and by no other route. There is no withdrawal to an address you nominate and no transfer to another account. The 1% is therefore a one-way toll rather than a round trip, and the right amount to send is the amount you intend to spend — plus, if you want it working for you, whatever you are content to leave sitting.

The day the top-up fee has paid for itself

Here is the part no fee table can show you, because it needs the other side of the account.

Your balance earns 4% a year, calculated on the closing balance each day and credited the next morning. It is interest on what you hold, not cashback on what you spend, so it accrues whether the card is used daily or not at all. That rate is doing something specific to the 1%: it is paying it back.

The arithmetic is a single division. A deposit is credited at 99% of what you sent, and it grows by 4% divided by 365 each day. It returns to the amount you originally sent when that growth has made up the missing one per cent — which happens after about 92 days, or 3 months. Leave the deposit alone for a quarter of a year and you are level. Leave it longer and you are ahead of where you started, having paid a fee.

So the honest way to describe the top-up fee is not as a cost but as a wait. It is expensive if you top up on Monday and spend it all on Tuesday, and it is free if the money sits for a season. Nothing about that is a promise: the rate is variable, the balance is not a bank deposit, and if the rate changes this number changes with it. It is a division, not a guarantee — where the 4% actually comes from is set out in its own guide.

A coincidence that catches people out, so it is worth separating the two: 92 days is how long a deposit takes to make its fee back, and $92 is the smallest balance whose daily interest already exceeds one cent, so that a payment lands every morning rather than being carried forward. Same figure, entirely different question. Below $92 you still earn every day; you are simply paid in instalments once the running total reaches a cent.

The ratio that decides whether the card costs you anything

« Is it expensive? » has no answer without knowing how you use it, and most comparisons dodge that by quoting a percentage and moving on. There is a better answer, and it is one number.

The fee is charged on what flows through. The interest is paid on what sits still. One is a percentage of your annual throughput, the other a percentage of your average balance. They cancel out at a fixed ratio between the two, and that ratio does not depend on how much money you have — only on how you use it.

At 1% on top-ups and 4.08% effective on the balance, the crossover is 24.5%: hold an average balance worth about a quarter of what you top up in a year, and the interest covers every fee you pay. Above that line the card is free and then profitable. Below it, you are paying for convenience — which may well be worth it, but you should know which side you are on.

Read the first row carefully, because it is the common case rather than the flattering one. Someone funding $600 across a year and keeping a couple of hundred dollars on the card is not a heavy user, and their card is already free. The heavy row is the expensive one in absolute terms, and it is still only $6.78 a month for 5 cards, a physical card and $12,000 of throughput.

Two levers move you up that table, and neither is a trick. Top up less often in larger amounts? No — that changes nothing, because the fee is a flat percentage rather than a fixed charge, and twelve deposits of $100 cost precisely the same 1% as one deposit of $1,200. What does move you is the chain fee, which is charged per transaction: fewer, larger deposits pay it once instead of twelve times. And keeping a balance rather than draining it moves you directly, since interest is calculated on the closing balance each day — a card emptied every evening earns nothing at all, no matter how much passed through it.

What five cards cost, and what a slot is worth

Your first virtual card is free and arrives on its own: the first deposit of at least $100 activates it. After that a virtual card is $2, debited from your balance at the moment you create it, and an account holds 5 at a time. Filling every slot therefore costs $8 in total, once, for the life of the account.

That is cheap enough to change how you use cards, which is the actual point of the price. At $2 it is not worth agonising over whether a merchant deserves its own card — give it one. One card per subscription, capped just above the real price, turns cancelling into deleting a card instead of arguing with a support desk, and it means a card number leaking somewhere exposes one merchant rather than your whole balance. That pattern has a guide of its own.

The distinction that costs people $2 is between freezing and deleting, so it is worth getting right the first time:

• Freezing declines every authorisation on that card instantly and is reversible in one tap. It is free, and it does not release the slot — a frozen card is still one of your 5.
• Deleting is permanent, stops the card for good and gives the slot straight back. Your history keeps everything that card spent.

So freeze what might come back, delete what is finished. Deleting a card and creating a replacement because you were not sure costs $2; freezing costs nothing. One card can never be deleted — the default one — because an account keeps at least one card at all times. You can freeze, rename and cap it like any other.

If you are creating cards from code, the same $2 applies per card and the same ceiling of 5 applies to the account. A retried request that quietly succeeded the first time will happily charge you twice and burn a slot; the API guide covers how to avoid it.

The one line item that is not small

Everything above is measured in single dollars. The physical card is not: $35 all in — the card itself plus worldwide shipping — or $60 with priority shipping, which adds $25. It comes out of your balance in one debit when you place the order, and if the balance will not cover it the order screen tells you the shortfall instead of letting you commit.

After that it costs nothing. No monthly fee attaches to it, no charge for leaving it in a drawer, and no renewal to be surprised by.

Given it is by some distance the largest number on this page, the useful question is whether you need one at all, and for most readers the answer is no. A virtual card in Apple Pay or Google Pay taps the same terminals in supported shops. Plastic can help at chip terminals, counters that ask to see a card in hand, or when you cannot use your phone. ATM availability and withdrawal fees are unconfirmed; check with support before ordering for cash access. If none of those describes your month, the $35 is better left on the balance, where it earns 4% a year instead.

What you are also buying is a one-off exception to how this account works: it is the only action that requires a delivery address. What the form asks for, and what is erased the day the card ships, is covered in full in the physical card guide.

Five ways to pay more than you have to

None of these are traps in the schedule. They are all arithmetic, and each one costs real money.

1. Sending on an expensive network out of habit. Our 1% does not change with the coin you choose; the chain's fee changes enormously. On a small deposit the network fee can exceed everything we charge, which makes the network the most expensive decision on this page and the one most people make without looking.
2. Many small deposits instead of a few. Not for our fee — that is a flat percentage and is identical either way — but for the chain's, which is charged per transaction. Twelve deposits pay it twelve times.
3. Deleting a card you were only pausing. Freezing is free and reversible. Recreating a deleted card costs $2 and gives you a new number, which means updating every merchant that had the old one.
4. Emptying the balance every evening. Interest is calculated on the closing balance, so a balance that reaches zero each night earns nothing, and the 1% you paid on the way in is never made back. Leaving even a modest float changes which side of the crossover you are on.
5. Ordering the plastic before you know you need it. $35 is roughly a year of fees for a light user. Try a month with the virtual card in a phone wallet first; the physical card will still be there.

And one thing that is not a way to save money, though it looks like one: paying in the merchant's currency rather than in dollars, or the reverse. That conversion happens at the point of sale on the network's terms, exactly as it does on any other card, and nothing about our schedule changes with it.

If you want the wider picture rather than the price list — what the card can and cannot do, which coins fund it, and what you give up in exchange for no identity check — that is the complete no-KYC card guide. If it is the 4% you want to understand before you rely on it, the honest version of where it comes from is in its own guide, and the comparison with a cashback card is worked through here.

Frequently asked questions

Product references and further reading

• CryptoCard fees and funding minimums
• CryptoCard Terms of Service

Published by CryptoCard. Product terms, eligibility and third-party features can change; use the linked reference for the current details.