I’ve talked to their support team and what I came to know is that they’ve no intention to add more payment gateways. This is really bad as because Bitpay is repugnant and also not user friendly. They blocked a vast majority of countries. Hope BitWarden listen us and impermanent a different payment gateway for crypto users.
I added credits via BitPay now the first time.
The user experience wasn’t super. The payment to BitPay was okay. However once BitPay said it received the money it took like 5 long minutes until it appeared in the Bitwarden account page.
That was not so nice when paying with something “new” and for a moment it’s unclear where the money is now.
Could be that a self hosted instance would make it faster but I guess it’s understandable to focus on one field.
Cryptomus and a self hosted BTCPAY server are good options.
Sadly Bitpay wanted me to make an account and verify my ID just to send a Bitcoin payment, it defeats the point and they can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.
My Bitwarden premium expired recently and when I tried to renew my subscription via Bitpay, they insisted I upload my GOVERNMENT ID to make a $20 payment!
I refused and have been an involuntary unpaid user since, because there seems to be no supported way to make anonymous payments.
Please offer a privacy friendly alternative, ideally Monero/XMR payments. But at least get rid of Bitpay. Thank you.
I would like to strongly suggest replacing BitPay with another cryptocurrency payment processor. To demonstrate the problem, here are the steps I had to take to pay via BitPay while using Electrum wallet:
I had to temporarily change the email address linked to my Bitwarden account, since this is automatically shared with BitPay and could not be changed.
Rather than just displaying an address to send Bitcoin to, you have to choose the wallet software that you are using. Note that BitPay offers an extremely limited selection of wallets, so at this point you will already lose out on sales from any users who are using a wallet that is not listed here (not an issue with any other payment processor, there is no reason to even prompt the user for this at all).
After selecting Electrum, BitPay tells the user to ‘Disable replace-by-fee’. Note that this setting was removed from Electrum over 2 years ago (Replace-By-Fee · Issue #8466 · spesmilo/electrum · GitHub), suggesting that the BitPay side of this is completely unmaintained.
The QR/URL listed on the invoice does not work, so the following steps have to be taken to still be able to pay:
Extract the BitPay URL embedded in the Bitcoin URL.
Send a request to it using a tool like cURL, setting the header ‘Accept: application/payment-request’. This is required to receive the raw payment information; simply opening the page in a browser just opens the original invoice.
Manually send Bitcoin using the payment information extracted from the previous request. I figured out how to do this thanks to this website: DeBitpay (I think the fact that this site even exists already speaks volumes)
As you can see, this payment flow is far from user-friendly and I could imagine that any non-technical users would simply be unable to pay at all. Note that I am not the only one with issues with BitPay, there have been multiple previous complaints (albeit for different reasons):
Even ignoring all the privacy/KYC concerns, using BitPay will definitely cause a large amount of users to simply give up due to their service being borderline unusable.
I have used this myself in the past and it is very solid. It even offers a BitPay-compatible API (quoting their website: “Migrating from BitPay to BTCPay normally is as easy as changing a URL”, see: Using the BTCPay API for Custom Integration | BTCPay Server )
Third-party: Literally any other payment processor ever. Again, nothing even comes close to being as terrible as BitPay.
I hope that this suggestion will be considered, thanks in advance.
Users who have just signed up can’t vote for this feature request because their trust level is too low. Being asked for KYC is unacceptable, we shouldn’t have to go through the bureaucracy of voting for this. Please just change the provider.
In the interest of transparency, it is very unlikely that Bitwarden will replace Bitpay as a crypto payment provider. The reality is that crypto payments are used by so few people that it’s just not worth the development effort required.
Those of you interested in anonymous payments should explore alternatives that work with Bitwarden’s existing payment options. I think someone on this thread suggested prepaid visa cards.
@Micah_Edelblut Thanks for providing this explanation (although it will likely be disappointing news to those who support this feature request). What if there were a community contribution of the required code? Do you think it would still be unlikely for Bitwarden QA resources to be allocated to approving such a PR?
Hi, I built something that might be relevant to this thread.
CipherPay is a non-custodial Zcash payment processor. No BitPay, no Coinbase Commerce, no custody. Payments go directly from the customer to the merchant’s wallet, fully shielded.
Why it’s a natural fit for Bitwarden specifically: Bitcoin payments are publicly visible on-chain, anyone can see that a wallet paid for a Bitwarden subscription. For a product whose entire value is protecting user data, that’s an odd gap. Shielded Zcash hides sender, receiver, and amount. No payment metadata leaks.
CipherPay and the interest this thread demonstrates in having a password manager like BitWarden (or which also uses the existing repo) seems like a match made in heaven. While I haven’t searched much to find legal roadblocks to competing with Bitwarden®, there may not be much there. My very short search found this page about its trademark. Perhaps a consortium of crypto enthusiasts would be interested in developing a service that manages passwords and offers premium service to those willing to send crypto to its principals.
If you like (or hate!) BitPay, please consider adding your two cents at Change crypto payment provider (replace BitPay) and voting on it. It is the top link I found when I entered “BitPay” into the search box here on BW Community Forums. The top five links reflected negative views of the payment processor. I have finally been able to increase the vote count for it and wanted to call more attention to it. I didn’t see any posts in that thread that were in favor of keeping BitPay.
I would like to see it get replaced because of its requirement that the person paying for a BW account verify their identity.