For decades, subscriptions have been successfully paid with the help of bank cards and other payment systems. But with the growing popularity of crypto payments and with the awareness of the obvious advantages inherent in cryptocurrency, more and more users are wondering how they can pay for a subscription with crypto. In today’s article, we will analyze in detail what advantages and difficulties crypto subscriptions have, what solutions the market offers and how you can set up crypto subscriptions today.
Key Points:
- With the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies, many companies started to think about accepting crypto payments.
- The implementation of the idea of crypto subscriptions has a number of difficulties.
- NOWPayments provides an opportunity for business owners to accept crypto as payment for a subscription.
What is it about?
The idea of small but constant payments instead of large one-time purchases has become one of the main consumer trends of the past decade. In 2022, it is difficult to find an area that the subscription model has not yet reached, and the market is growing by more than 100% per year for five years in a row. It is not known who exactly invented subscriptions, but their first mentions appeared more than 300 years ago — in the 17th century, this model was used by publishers of books and periodicals in England. But the real “boom” happened only in the 2010s with the ubiquity of the Internet. By the end of the decade, subscriptions are no longer limited to TV series and magazines: now they can satisfy almost all life needs. In just a few years, the market has changed, and many large corporations have implemented this payment model.
In parallel, we can observe the rise of cryptocurrency payments, which today surpass bank payments in many areas. Cryptocurrency is accepted as payment by such global corporations as Wikipedia, Microsoft, Overstock, and many others. And the list of merchants accepting crypto as a payment option is growing by leaps and bounds.
With such a rapid growth that subscription economics and crypto payments are undergoing, how soon will the next stage be waiting for us? Namely, the crypto subscription. And what solutions can the market offer already? These and other issues will be analyzed further in the article.
When did crypto subscription payments emerge?
Groundhog
One of the first projects was Groundhog, where the developers promised to users a reliable source of income. It was enough just to tinker with a few lines of code or install a plugin (available for WooCommerce). In addition, it became possible to use stablecoins and automatic crypto-to-fiat conversion. However, this project was not crowned with success and popularity.
Sablier
Another innovative project was Sablier, which introduced a completely different approach, namely “streaming payments”. The bottom line was that the subscription was prepaid for a certain period, and the funds were kept in the protocol, while the recipient was receiving continuous streaming payments. At any time, the subscriber could terminate the subscription and withdraw the remaining funds. Unfortunately, the demand for this service was also not great.
Nowadays
To date, many platforms have already appeared that fully satisfy the needs of users. For example, with NOWPayments, you can easily accept cryptocurrencies as payment for goods or services, subscriptions, and other payments.
Advantages of crypto subscription payments
- Community-oriented
To date, you are unlikely to meet a community more involved and cohesive than a cryptocurrency one. And there are millions of members of such communities. For example, the same Bitcoin has more than 4 million subscribers on the official Twitter account. These users are actively pushing their favorite cryptocurrencies as a means of payment and will be extremely grateful and encouraged if they have the opportunity to pay for a subscription with cryptocurrency.
- Low fees
We all know about the high fees that are imposed on international money transfers by banks. This happens for the reason that when a user sends a payment, it does not immediately go to the recipient’s wallet, but passes a certain number of intermediaries (each of whom charges a fee). In the case of cryptocurrency, the number of intermediaries decreases significantly if it does not reach zero.
- Lightning-fast transactions
Another disadvantage of bank payments is speed. Who would want to wait a day, and sometimes several to receive payment? With cryptocurrency, everything happens in the blink of an eye.
- Safety
Since users do not need to enter their personal data when sending a payment, it means that the risk of theft of this data is excluded. In addition, the risk of chargeback fraud is eliminated, since crypto transactions are irreversible.
- Availability
In addition to the above advantages, we cannot but note the fact that crypto is a currency without borders. A user who is a resident of Africa, for example, can safely and effortlessly send the necessary amount to a resident of America, without spending money on conversion fees.
Challenges of cryptocurrency subscription payments
Sovereignty
We all know how a bank card subscription works. You just set it up and forget (then suddenly discover that funds were debited for a subscription to some Adobe Photoshop that you hadn’t used for a hundred years). In the case of cryptocurrency, funds will not be automatically debited from your wallet. And if there are already solutions for recipients in the form of programmable invoices, then consumers still have to manually send a payment every time.
Volatility
Cryptocurrency is not really suitable for paying for subscriptions due to its volatile nature. The price of the same Bitcoin can fluctuate significantly during the day or even an hour. However, it is worth noting that this problem is completely solved by stablecoins.
The future of crypto subscription payments
Unfortunately, to date, users have not yet been offered a successful and convenient crypto subscription model. Therefore, this sphere still remains empty and is waiting for its hero. It is quite obvious that subscriptions will not go away from us, but with the fact that cryptocurrency is so tightly included in our lives: crypto plus subscription is an imminent alliance.
How to pay for subscriptions using crypto
To date, there is still no perfect solution to how to accept cryptocurrency as payment for a subscription. There is no magic pill that you ate and forgot. However, the good news is that the process can still be a bit programmable.
With NOWPayments, business owners can easily set up receiving periodic payments in the form of invoices. Everything is extremely simple. It is enough for you to:
- Sign up to your personal account.
- Navigate to the “Invoice” section and click the “Create Invoice” button.
- Fill in the required fields (the currency, the order ID, the frequency with which your subscribers will be sent a reminder).
- Add your subscriber’s email address (you may add as many as you wish).
- Wait for your subscriber to confirm the subscription.
- We will do the rest for you. Our service sends reminders to consumers of your services, they only have to make the payment.
Conclusion
Of course, the implementation of the idea of crypto subscriptions is still in its infancy. But fortunately, there is progress and payment companies are working in this direction. Today, you can accept cryptocurrency as payment for a subscription using invoices, which can be configured in a few clicks. We sincerely hope that in the near future there will be a really worthwhile solution to this issue, which will be convenient not only for companies but also for consumers.