Why RDPForge only accepts crypto (and what that means for you)

We are asked this several times a week, usually phrased as "why can't I just pay with PayPal". Here is the full answer, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.

The chargeback maths

In 2021 we accepted cards through a mainstream processor. Over eleven months:

• 2.3% of card transactions ended in a chargeback
• 89% of those were not fraud against the cardholder — they were customers who had used the server for weeks and then disputed the charge
• Each dispute cost $25 in fees whether we won or lost
• Our acquirer held a 10% rolling reserve for 180 days
• We employed one person nearly full-time on manual fraud review, which also meant delivery took hours instead of minutes

Fully loaded, card acceptance was costing about 9% of revenue in a business where hardware amortisation is the largest line item. It also made instant delivery impossible: an automatically-provisioned server paid by stolen card is a free server for an attacker, so we had to review orders by hand.

What removing it bought

We stopped accepting cards in February 2022 and cut list prices by 30% the same day. Nothing else changed — same hardware, same datacenters, same staff. That is the entire explanation for why a 4 vCPU / 8 GB Windows server is $22 here and $40-50 at hosts that take Visa.

The second benefit was delivery time. With no fraud risk to review, provisioning became fully automatic. Average delivery went from 3-6 hours to 4 minutes.

What it costs you

We would rather state this plainly than bury it.

• No chargeback protection. If we took your money and vanished, no bank would claw it back. That is a real asymmetry and you should weigh it.
• You need crypto. For someone who has never used an exchange, the first purchase is a genuine hurdle — perhaps 20-30 minutes including verification.
• Renewals are manual. No card on file means no automatic renewal. We send four reminders, but the responsibility is yours.
• Irreversible mistakes. Wrong network, wrong address, funds gone.

What we do to offset it

• 72-hour money-back guarantee, no questions. The contractual replacement for a chargeback. Our refund rate is 1.4%, and we honour it without argument — arguing would cost more in reputation than the refund costs in cash.
• Stablecoins. Pay in USDT or USDC and price volatility never touches you.
• No lock-in. Monthly terms, no contracts, full image export whenever you want to leave.
• A public track record. Same domain since 2020, incident history published in full, legal entity and address on the site.

Why OxaPay specifically

We evaluated five processors in 2022. OxaPay won on three points: it settles roughly 40 assets including the low-fee networks customers actually use, its webhooks are reliable enough to drive automated provisioning (a webhook that misses one payment in a thousand is a support disaster), and it does not require our customers to create an account with a third party just to pay an invoice. You send coins to an address, we get a signed callback, your server builds itself.

Will you ever take cards?

Not while it costs 9% of revenue. If a processor offered hosting-appropriate terms, we would consider it as a more expensive tier rather than repricing everything upward — the customers who chose us for the price should not subsidise the ones who want a card. Until then, crypto it is.