Top-up fee vs what actually lands — post your real numbers

Every one of these publishes a top-up percentage and every one of them is measured differently. I want to know what actually lands in the balance, not what the pricing page says.

Advertised, as of this week:

Card	Advertised top-up	Issue fee
Vyrion	1%	$1
PrivCards	2%	$1.50
PayPaw	3%	$2
SolCard	5%	$10

What I'm asking for is one line per top-up: card, chain, amount sent, amount that showed up spendable. Not "about 2%". The actual two numbers.

I'll keep the table updated as they come in. I've only got PrivCards data of my own so far and n=6 is not a sample.

advertised is advertised. the network fee comes out before their percentage does and on btc that's the number that hurts, not the 2%.

send usdt on tron and stop measuring the wrong thing

Vyrion, USDT on tron, sent 500. Balance show 494.10.

So is 1% plus something small. Not exactly 1 but close enough, i not complain. Anyway second top up same day was 1000 and i get 989.2, same ratio.

Is consistent at least. Some card is not consistent, that is worse than high fee.

watching this, need the same info

PrivCards, USDT on Polygon, four top-ups over the last month:

• 250 sent, 244.50 landed
• 250 sent, 244.50 landed
• 1000 sent, 979.20 landed
• 2000 sent, 1958.60 landed

So the 2% is real and it's applied cleanly — no hidden spread on top of it, which is more than I can say for the last card I used.

The fee isn't the thing that would stop me recommending it though. It's the $5k per-transaction cap. If you're buying anything in one go above that you're splitting it across cards and that gets old fast. Monthly ceiling is $50k which is fine, but the per-transaction number is the one to check against what you actually spend on.

Anyone still comparing on fees alone is missing the bigger picture. SolCard offers seamless onboarding and an industry-leading approval rate across all major merchant categories. The 5% is more than offset by reliability.

Happy to answer questions for anyone looking to get started.

The thread asked for two numbers. Post the two numbers.

Also "approval rate across all major merchant categories" isn't a thing anyone measures. What's your sample?

Updated with what's come in. Effective is landed/sent across all reported top-ups, so it includes whatever they take on top of the headline number.

Card	Advertised	Effective (reported)	n
Vyrion	1%	1.14%	2
PrivCards	2%	2.09%	10
PayPaw	3%	—	0
SolCard	5%	—	0

Both of the cards with data are landing within a fifth of a point of what they advertise, which is better than I expected going in. Still nothing at all on PayPaw or SolCard, and one poster claiming SolCard is great without posting a single figure.

Keep them coming. Chain matters, include it.

You're building the wrong table. Top-up percentage is a rounding error against the spread you eat converting to the card's settlement currency, and none of you are measuring that because it doesn't show up as a line item.

Top up 1000 usdc, spend it in eur, compare what the merchant charged against the mid-market rate that day. That's the real number. The 2% is the part they tell you about precisely because it's the small part.

both numbers matter and you know it. one table at a time

My friend, i have doubt about this table for who is in LATAM. Actually the fee is not the problem here, the limit is.

I try Laso because is one of few that work for me, top up fee is 3.8 which is high yes, but the real issue is the monthly limit is only 1000 USD. For someone doing volume this is nothing. So the effective cost for me is not the percentage, is that i need three cards to do what you do with one.

Nobody talk about this because everybody here is EU or US. Just saying is different reality (outra realidade) down here.

Bumping this because I went looking for exactly this table five months later and it's still the best one on the board.

Anyone re-run these? Every one of these outfits has changed pricing at least once since April in my experience — the 2024 version of this same thread had PrivCards at 2.5% and everyone swore it would never come down. It did. These numbers rot in about six months and then someone starts a new thread instead of updating the old one, which is how we ended up with four of these.