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.