When we started BitPay in 2011, we saw an opportunity to finally give merchants around the world relief from interchange fees. Today BitPay is proud to announce a new free plan which offers basic payment processing free-of-charge, forever.
For decades, businesses have watched their profits erode from rising processing fees. Today's Internet payment system is built around credit cards, which were created in the 1950s — before the Internet existed. When card issuers began offering rewards and cash-back bonuses to shoppers, they started increasing the interchange fees to cover the costs. Without many alternatives, merchants have been forced to accept that interchange rates are not going down.
Our free processing allows merchants to use any plugin, API, or app from BitPay's library and grants them access to BitPay's industry-leading support. With quick response times and personal service, BitPay's client operations team is second to none. With premium plans, Business and Enterprise customers have additional access to our dedicated engineering and support services.
Our mission at BitPay hasn't changed since 2011: to make bitcoin every merchant's favorite form of payment. We want merchants to not only use our service — we want them to love our service. We want them to be as excited about bitcoin as we are and to encourage more of their customers to pay this way. After experiencing such a simple, low-cost, and low-risk payment option, we're confident they won't look back.
Merchants previously subscribed to our Starter and Professional plans will be automatically migrated to our free plan, and fees for the remainder of the current billing cycle will be returned to the merchant.
BitPay has built the world's leading bitcoin solutions for ecommerce, billing, and retail. We offer daily settlement to our merchants' bank accounts in 33 countries. We have 99.99% uptime and industry-leading teams for implementation and support. We're constantly developing open source projects to grow the bitcoin ecosystem, including Bitcore, Insight, BitAuth, and Copay. And we've raised over $32 million from world-class investors.
We're on a quest to onboard one million merchants by the end of 2016. Join the global economy and start accepting bitcoin today.
