Cryptocurrency is on our payment list and a steady minority of subscribers use it. It is also the only route we offer that leaves you with no way back, and that belongs in the first paragraph rather than a footnote near the bottom.
Both halves are true and neither cancels the other. What follows is an attempt to weigh them properly: what crypto genuinely does better than a card for a purchase like this one, what it costs you in recourse, and how to work out which side of that trade you are standing on before anything leaves your wallet.
Why anyone pays for a subscription this way
Start with the reasons, because most writing on this subject skips straight to the warning and leaves the reader wondering why anybody bothers. The reasons are practical rather than ideological.
The biggest one is that no issuer gets a vote. A card issued in one country, paying a digital service billed in another, in a merchant category the bank's risk model has decided it dislikes, gets declined more often than most people expect. The decline is silent, the money is not taken, and clearing it means a call to a bank that may or may not happen this evening. A crypto transfer has nobody in that position. It either sends or it does not, and it almost always sends.
The second is cost, in a narrow sense. The subscription price is the same on every route we offer, so nothing is saved there. But a card paying in a currency it was not issued in usually collects a foreign transaction fee from its own issuer, commonly two to three percent, which on a yearly plan is real money. A crypto transfer swaps that for a network fee set by your wallet, typically smaller. The cross-border arithmetic is worked through country by country on the country page.
Then a handful of smaller ones. No card details go anywhere, including to the payment company. It works at two in the morning on a Sunday with no bank involved in the decision. And some people simply hold coins already and would rather spend those than move money between accounts to reach a card. None of that is unreasonable, and none of it deserves the suspicion it sometimes gets.
Speed and cost, with the real numbers
Here is where each route actually sits. The last two columns are the ones that matter after something has gone wrong, which is the only time anyone thinks about them.
| Method | Time to settle | What it can add on top | Who can reverse it | How long you have |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Card | Seconds | Your issuer's foreign transaction fee, where it applies | Your card issuer | Around 120 days under most scheme rules |
| Apple Pay | Seconds | Whatever the underlying card charges | The issuer of the card behind it | The same as that card |
| Google Pay | Seconds | Whatever the underlying card charges | The issuer of the card behind it | The same as that card |
| PayPal | Seconds, longer on a slow funding source | Their conversion spread if they convert for you | PayPal, with the funding card behind it | Their own claim window, set by them |
| Cryptocurrency | Roughly 10 to 40 minutes | A network fee your wallet sets | Nobody | No window exists |
Read across the bottom row and the trade is visible in one line. Crypto is the only method where the third and fourth columns are empty, and it is the only method where the wait is measured in tens of minutes rather than seconds. The full method-by-method comparison lives on our payment methods page.
Final means final: what you are giving up
People hear irreversible and picture a difficult refund process. That is not what it means. There is no chargeback, no claim form, no arbitration, no ombudsman and no appeal, because there is no institution standing between you and the recipient to hear one. The transaction is a fact recorded on a network that has no mechanism for un-recording it, and no court order aimed at the chain itself would change that.
Even the recipient cannot reverse it. If a seller wants to give the money back, they have to voluntarily construct a new payment going the other way. That is a meaningful difference from a card refund, where the money returns through a process the seller does not fully control. With crypto, a refund exists only for as long as the seller chooses to cooperate.
Finality is not a defect in cryptocurrency. It is the product. The only question is whether you want to own that product on this particular purchase.
Our own terms do refund crypto payments: the money goes back in the coin it arrived in, valued as it was quoted at purchase, to an address you give us, with the network fee taken out of the transfer by the chain. The terms are on the refund policy page, printed in advance so nobody meets them for the first time in a reply. But be clear about what that is. It is a commitment we have published and can be held to reputationally. It is not a right you can enforce over our heads, and no writing on any website turns it into one.
The rate, the quote window, and the drift
A crypto payment is quoted twice. Once as a price in dollars, and once as a quantity of coin derived from that price at a particular moment. The second number has a shelf life. Markets move, and a quote you act on ninety minutes later is no longer the same quote.
In practice that produces two small failure modes, both fixable and both annoying. Send late while the rate moved against the coin and the payment lands slightly short, so the order sits waiting for a top-up. Send late the other way and it lands over, which needs a manual correction at our end. Neither is a disaster and both cost time that a card payment would not have cost.
Two habits avoid the whole thing. Send promptly after the quote, or ask for a fresh one if you have been away from the chat. And do not shave the network fee to save a few cents: a transfer with a thin fee attached is the usual reason a twenty-minute confirmation turns into a morning of refreshing a block explorer. If the market moves between the quote and the send, the number we agreed is the number we honour; nobody reprices an order behind the person who placed it.
Getting the transfer right the first time
This section matters more than the fraud section, because the money most people lose in crypto is not lost to a seller. It is lost to a mistake made in thirty seconds by somebody in a hurry.
- Match the network, not just the coin. The same coin often exists on several chains. Sending on the wrong one is the single most common way a transfer disappears, and it disappears completely.
- Copy the address, never retype it. Then compare the first five and last five characters against the source before confirming. This thirty-second habit also defeats clipboard malware, which works by swapping an address after you copy it and relies on nobody looking.
- Send a test transfer if the amount would hurt. One extra network fee to confirm the address works is cheap insurance on a three-figure payment.
- Check whether the fee comes out of the amount. Some wallets deduct it from what you send rather than adding it on top, which is how a payment arrives a fraction short without anybody doing anything wrong.
- Keep the transaction reference. It is your receipt, it is public, and it settles any question about whether a payment was made in about four seconds. What should reach you afterwards is covered in what happens after you pay.
Who it suits, and who should use a card instead
The method is not good or bad in the abstract. It fits some buyers and not others, and the split is fairly clean.
It suits a repeat buyer. Somebody renewing with a seller they have already dealt with for a year has replaced the dispute right with something better: evidence. It suits anyone whose cards keep getting declined on cross-border digital purchases, which is a genuinely tiring problem and one crypto solves outright. It suits people who already hold coins and treat spending them as ordinary. And it suits anyone who would rather no card number existed in the transaction at all.
A card suits everyone else, and particularly the first purchase from a seller you cannot vouch for. It also suits anyone who would find the loss painful, anyone not comfortable checking an address character by character, and anyone who wants to be watching in the next five minutes rather than the next forty. The differences between a raw card entry and a wallet are set out in card versus wallet, and both of those keep the referee that crypto removes.
One thing this is not: a reason to distrust a seller for offering crypto. A menu with cryptocurrency on it alongside card and PayPal is an ordinary menu. A menu with nothing but final routes on it is a different statement entirely, and worth reading as one.
What you still hold instead of a dispute
Giving up the dispute route does not leave you with nothing. It leaves you with a different, weaker set of things, and it is worth knowing what they are rather than assuming the position is hopeless.
You keep the written record. The chat thread showing what was promised, the transaction reference showing what was sent, the expiry date in writing, the published price you were quoted against. None of that forces money to move, but all of it is what a seller answers to when you put a complaint in front of them, and it is considerably more than most checkout flows leave behind.
You also keep an asymmetry that works quietly in your favour. A seller who wants next July's renewal has a commercial reason to fix this July's problem, and annual subscriptions make that reason unusually strong. And the plain statistical point: the overwhelming majority of problems on a subscription are technical, get solved inside an hour, and never involve money at all. The dispute right is insurance against a rare event, not a tool you were expecting to use.
Our position, stated plainly
We accept cryptocurrency at the same price as everything else: $69 for one screen, $97 for two and $137 for three, twelve months, one payment. No discount for using it and no surcharge for avoiding it. Nothing renews itself and no card is kept on file, so the choice of method changes what happens today and nothing at all about next year. The plans are on the pricing page.
We will not push you towards it, and that is the one piece of advice here we would extend to every seller you deal with. A discount that appears only on the final route, a card system that is down for exactly the length of your purchase, a deadline attached to the one payment nobody can undo: those are not offers, they are transfers of risk. Cryptocurrency deserves to be chosen, not steered into.
On a first order with us, pay by card or PayPal. Keep the referee for the purchase where you have no history to judge us on. If it goes well and you would rather send coin next July, that is a decision made from a position of knowing something, which is exactly when the method makes sense. The wider walk-through of ordering is on how to pay for IPTV.
