BitPay continues to break down barriers for merchants looking to accept Bitcoin. The payment processor launched an exciting new pricing plan for businesses that will ultimately eliminate every hesitation for whether a company should accept Bitcoin as payment for products and services. Get excited, BitPay’s new plan offers merchants basic payment processing with zero fees for an unlimited amount of transactions, forever.
With the unveiling of the new plan, BitPay can lower the barrier to entry for businesses around the world who want to accept Bitcoin. Now there are very few excuses one can give for why they would not utilize the digital currency as an additional form of payment. Although the company provides plans with additional services at a per-month cost, the new basic plan will allow every business to see the benefits that bitcoin provides, free of charge. In other words, this is a great time to start accepting bitcoin, regardless of your experience level.
The news took Reddit by storm on Wednesday when the company held an AMA to give the community even more information about the new basic plan. With over 250 comments, the main topics included what effect the proposed BitLicense would have, compliance, the zero fee structure and increasing bitcoin adoption throughout the world. It quickly became apparent that the company’s main focus is toward vastly decreasing barriers and making it easy for a business to start accepting bitcoin. “Processing fees should not make or break a merchant’s decision to accept bitcoin,” BitPay stated during the AMA. This is a big step forward, one which many view as a step in the right direction toward growing the adoption rate around the world. To do this, the company is staying the course in continuously working to improve user experience on both the merchant and customer side. This has been seen in recently released tools such as Copay, Bitcore and GetBits, all of which are open-source.
For merchants, the new basic plan provides unlimited basic bitcoin payment processing free of transaction fees, for however long they wish. This plan also provides unlimited access to any plugin, API or app from the BitPay library, and includes email support. However, some merchants require additional products and support, which is where the company’s Business and Enterprise options come into play. Both plans do have a monthly cost associated with them, but provide businesses with services to match their specific needs. In addition to the features of the Free Plan, the Business pricing plan includes phone support and Quickbooks integration; while the Enterprise level puts everything together and provides a dedicated account manager, VPN access, and enterprise engineering and integration.
It seems that this freemium model has struck a chord with the bitcoin community and many are very excited to get on board. Although BitPay operates strictly on the merchant side, they have always been quite good at introducing new things that are aimed at increasing awareness of bitcoin to both consumers and merchants – most notably, their open-source development projects, a sponsorship of The Bitcoin Bowl and Georgia Tech athletics and now, the first bitcoin payment processing plan that is free-of-charge, forever. Will BitPay be able to reach its goal of one million merchants by the end of 2016? The new plan will surely help.
