Accept Bitcoin as a merchant
Traditional payment processors take 2 to 3 percent of every transaction, hold your money for days, and expose you to chargebacks. A customer's bank can reverse a completed payment weeks after the sale. You lose the product and the revenue. That is the system merchants have been conditioned to accept because there was no alternative. Now there is.
Bitcoin payments settle between your customer and your wallet. No intermediary holds the funds. No bank decides whether the transaction is valid. On Lightning, settlement is instant and costs fractions of a cent. On-chain, it is final within an hour. There are no chargebacks because Bitcoin transactions are irreversible by design. The same way cash is. Your customer pays, you receive, and the transaction is done.
The tools on this page range from self-hosted to fully managed. BTCPay Server is free, open-source, and runs on your own infrastructure. Zero processing fees, full control, payments go to your wallet. You can run it on a home node or VPS. If you want something simpler, managed processors like OpenNode and Lightspark handle the infrastructure and charge a fee per transaction. Still less than card processors.
Compare the tools below on what matters: fees, custody model (who holds the bitcoin?), Lightning support, fiat conversion, and integration complexity. Select two and tap Compare to see them side-by-side.
Frequently asked questions
What is BTCPay Server?
BTCPay Server is a free, open-source, self-hosted bitcoin payment processor. You run it on your own server or home node, and it generates invoices, handles Lightning payments, and sends bitcoin to your wallet. Zero processing fees. No company sits between you and your customer's payment. That is the difference between using Bitcoin's properties and using another intermediary that happens to accept bitcoin. BTCPay is used by merchants, non-profits, and projects that want full sovereignty over their payment infrastructure.
Can I accept bitcoin and automatically receive fiat currency?
Yes. Managed services like OpenNode offer automatic conversion. Your customer pays in bitcoin, the processor converts to your local currency and deposits to your bank account. You get the benefits of bitcoin payments (speed, no chargebacks, global reach) without price exposure. The trade-off is that you are using a custodial intermediary and paying processing fees. BTCPay Server does not offer this natively, but third-party plugins exist. If you are willing to hold bitcoin, you skip the conversion fees entirely and benefit from sound money.
Do I need technical knowledge to set up bitcoin payments?
It depends on how much sovereignty you want. Managed processors like OpenNode and Lightspark are designed to be plug-and-play. Often just an API key and a WooCommerce or Shopify plugin. BTCPay Server requires more initial setup (a VPS or home node), but its documentation is excellent and the community is active. The technical bar for self-hosting keeps getting lower. The question is whether you want someone else to manage your payment rails, and what that convenience costs you in fees and control.
What are the fees for accepting bitcoin payments?
BTCPay Server charges zero processing fees. You only pay the Bitcoin network's transaction fees, which on Lightning are fractions of a cent. Managed services like OpenNode charge around 1% per transaction. Compare that to Visa and Mastercard's 2 to 3 percent plus fixed fees per transaction, plus chargeback risk, plus multi-day settlement. Bitcoin payments are not only cheaper. They are final. There is no call from a customer's bank three weeks later reversing your revenue.
What's the difference between BTCPay Server and OpenNode?
It is the same trade-off that runs through all of Bitcoin: sovereignty vs. convenience. BTCPay Server is self-hosted and free. You control the server, the keys, and the data. Payments go to your wallet with no intermediary. OpenNode manages everything for you: infrastructure, APIs, plugins. They charge a fee per transaction. They hold your bitcoin until you withdraw. BTCPay requires more setup but gives you maximum independence. OpenNode is faster to integrate but reintroduces the kind of dependency Bitcoin was designed to remove. You can use the detailed comparison to see the full breakdown.