Client refuses to touch crypto and wants to pay by card — what are my actual options

I take crypto for everything and it has never been a problem until now.

One client, retainer, pays monthly. He has been paying by bank transfer and I've asked him to stop for reasons I won't get into here. His answer was that he'll pay by card like a normal company or he'll find someone else, and he was not joking.

So: what does a one-client, one-invoice-a-month card payment look like if I don't want to open a merchant account? Everything I find is a storefront checkout and I don't have a storefront.

one client, one invoice a month. why is a gateway involved. either take the transfer or lose him

The transfer is the thing I'm trying to stop. That's the whole reason for the question.

What's the invoice for and how big is it. Both change the answer and you've given neither.

Consulting retainer, 3,400 a month, same amount every month, one invoice. Nothing exotic about what I do — the sensitivity is on my side, not his.

The category you want is card-to-crypto: the customer types a card in, the processor charges it, and you get paid in crypto because you are not the merchant of record on the card side. NowPayments has one. Cost is roughly 3.5% on the card leg plus the 0.5% gateway leg, so call it 4% all-in — on 3,400 that's about 136 a month you are paying for him to be comfortable.

The number nobody puts on the pricing page is approvals. I ran 41 card attempts through that flow between February and May across a mix of BINs:

BIN region	Attempts	Approved
EU consumer	18	16
EU corporate	9	4
US consumer	11	9
UK corporate	3	1

Corporate cards are where it falls apart, and a client paying a company retainer is going to reach for a corporate card. Test with his actual card before you tell him it works, because "declined" from him twice in a row is worse than the bank transfer you're trying to avoid.

OpenNode is the other direction — Lightning, one percent, but it's Bitcoin-only and he is not installing a wallet.

Four percent to move money that is already sitting in a bank into crypto. That's not a fee, that's a tax on somebody being squeamish. Make him pay it, not you.

I will say the unpopular thing: a monthly consulting retainer at that value is not a high-risk transaction by any definition a processor uses, and you are shopping in the wrong aisle. A conventional payment link would cost you under two percent and settle on a schedule you could set your watch by.

The reason not to do that is not the fee; it is that the conventional route puts your name and your bank on the record, permanently, and you clearly have a reason to care about that. That is a legitimate reason. But it is worth being honest that the four percent is buying you exactly one thing, and it isn't convenience.

Is correct but then name is on invoice forever. Anyway 136 dollar is cheap for that if you need it. Depend what you want.

Update in case anyone finds this later. Set up the card-to-crypto link, sent it to him, first attempt on the company card declined exactly as predicted upthread. He tried his personal card and it went through, and he now expenses it internally, which he mentions to me every single month.

So it works and I would not call it solved. Four percent and a monthly complaint.