Payments are rarely a feature users talk about first, but they define who can actually use your product. We chose a crypto-first path because our user base is international from day one.
When we looked at where our early beta users came from, the geographic spread was immediate and wide: Turkey, Nigeria, Indonesia, Pakistan, Ukraine, Brazil. Card payment support in these regions ranges from inconsistent to practically unusable. Building a product for global developers and then gatekeeping it behind a regional payment stack would be a contradiction.
Global coverage matters more than checkout aesthetics
Card support is uneven, risky, and expensive across many regions. USDT gives us a more predictable operating model and lets developers activate accounts without waiting for a regional payment stack to approve them.
We evaluated four alternatives before landing on USDT. Stripe covers many countries but blocks or heavily restricts a significant portion of our target markets. Local payment aggregators work regionally but require separate integrations per region and add compliance overhead that doesn't scale. PayPal is unavailable or unreliable in too many places. Crypto, specifically stablecoin-on-Tron, works everywhere with a wallet.
If your payment stack has a supported countries list, you have a product that doesn't work for a large portion of the world. We didn't want to build that.
Less operational friction for us and for you
- No chargeback handling or dispute resolution overhead.
- Fewer payment-provider policy surprises or account freezes.
- Instant settlement — no rolling reserves or payout delays.
- A simpler way to support international teams and agencies.
- No currency conversion costs for developers outside USD-native banking.
The operational simplification is significant from our side too. Chargebacks are a real cost for SaaS products — not just financially, but in time spent on dispute processes. Removing that entirely changes how the business operates at scale.
The tradeoffs we accepted
Crypto-first billing is not without friction. Some developers are unfamiliar with wallets and stablecoin transfers. Onboarding takes a little more explanation than a simple card form. We have invested in clear documentation and in-app guidance to close that gap.
We also considered that crypto billing can feel unfamiliar to enterprise buyers. Our current focus is individual developers and small teams, where this friction is much lower. If enterprise requirements evolve, we will revisit the billing stack — but we will not add card payments at the cost of making the product inaccessible to the majority of our users.
