BitPay Alternative: Non-Custodial USDC and USDT Payments

If you want a BitPay alternative for stablecoins, the deciding question is who holds the money between the customer's payment and your balance. inzi is non-custodial: payments go straight to your own merchant wallet, with USDC on Polygon, Base, Ethereum, and Solana, USDT on Polygon, Ethereum, Tron, and TON, and EURC on Base and Ethereum. inzi charges 0% per transaction on every plan; the cost is a flat monthly fee, starting at $0/month.

What are you actually replacing when you leave BitPay?

Most teams that look for an alternative are not unhappy with one feature. They are re-running an earlier decision, usually for one of four reasons:

• They accept stablecoins only and no longer need a broad list of coins.
• They want funds to land in a wallet they control rather than be settled to them later.
• They want a flat, predictable cost instead of a percentage that grows with volume.
• They need an API and webhooks that fit a digital product, not just a checkout button.

Writing down which of these applies makes the comparison faster. A team that needs a wide coin list has a different shortlist from a team that invoices clients in USDC and wants the money in its own wallet the moment the transaction confirms.

This post does not claim the incumbent is deficient. The comparison below is about one structural difference, and about what each side of that difference costs.

Custodial processor or non-custodial gateway: which model do you need?

There are two broad ways a crypto payment product can work.

Processor model. The provider sits in the flow of funds. The customer pays, the provider receives, and the provider later pays out to the merchant. This can simplify fiat conversion and reporting, because one party handles the whole chain. The cost is that your money is, for some period, an entry in someone else's system.

Non-custodial gateway model. The provider creates the payment request, watches the chain, and tells your system when it confirms. The funds move from the customer's wallet to yours. The provider never holds them, so there is no balance to pay out and nothing the provider can hold back.

inzi is the second model. It has no accounts that hold money. That is why this post says "merchant wallet" and not "your account": the wallet is yours, and inzi does not control it.

For a longer treatment of how this model works and where it fits, see the non-custodial crypto payment processor guide.

How do inzi and BitPay compare side by side?

The table fills in inzi's column from inzi's own pricing and network list. The other column points to the vendor's own pages instead of repeating numbers, because rates and supported assets change and the vendor's pricing page is the only reliable record.

The inzi column is the verified one; the other column is intentionally a pointer, not a figure.

Notes on reading the table. First, "0% per transaction" does not mean free at scale: the monthly plan is the cost, and which plan applies depends on volume and features. Second, a cell that points to the vendor's page is deliberate. A comparison that quotes a competitor's fee from memory is a comparison that will be wrong within a quarter.

Which stablecoin runs on which chain at inzi?

A common mistake in any stablecoin comparison is to read "supports USDT" as "supports USDT everywhere." At inzi the support is per chain:

Three practical consequences follow.

• A customer who holds USDT on Solana cannot pay with it through inzi. USDT runs on Polygon, Ethereum, Tron, and TON.
• EURC is available on Base and Ethereum only, which matters if you invoice in euros and want to avoid a currency conversion step.
• Chain choice changes the customer's gas cost and confirmation experience. Each chain's own documentation is the place to check current fee mechanics, for example Base and Solana.

If your customers are mostly on Tron holding USDT, that single fact can decide the shortlist before price enters the picture.

What does the cost look like at different volumes?

Percentage-based pricing and flat pricing cross over at some volume. Here is an illustration with made-up numbers, not a claim about any vendor's rates.

Suppose a business receives $20,000 a month in stablecoin payments. At a hypothetical 1% processing fee, that is $200 a month. At a hypothetical 0.5%, it is $100. Under a flat model with 0% per transaction, the cost is the plan price and nothing else, which on inzi is $0/month on Starter or $49/month on Growth.

Now double the volume to $40,000. The percentage costs double, while the flat plan stays where it is. That is the entire argument for flat pricing, and it also shows its limit: at very low volume, a small percentage can be cheaper than a monthly fee. Starter at $0/month removes that limit for small merchants, because there is no subscription.

What the numbers do not capture:

• Network gas paid by the customer or merchant, which depends on the chain and the moment.
• The cost of converting stablecoins to fiat, if fiat is needed. inzi settles in stablecoin to your wallet; converting to fiat happens through whatever exchange or off-ramp you already use.
• Staff time for wallet management, which is real and covered in the next section.

What does non-custodial cost you in practice?

This is the tradeoff that comparison pages tend to bury, so here it is plainly.

When payments go to your own wallet, the merchant is the security perimeter. Nobody at inzi can recover a lost key, reverse a transfer, or restore access. The wallet decisions that a custodial provider would otherwise absorb become the merchant's:

• Who holds the keys, and how many people must approve an outgoing transfer.
• Whether the receiving wallet is a single address or a multi-signature setup.
• How access is handed over when a finance lead leaves.
• How balances are moved to exchanges or cold storage, and how often.

There is a flip side. Because inzi does not hold your balance, there is no provider-side balance to hold back, and a provider compliance hold on your funds is not part of the model. Whether that tradeoff is worth it depends on how a team weighs operational burden against counterparty exposure. Small teams without wallet experience often find the burden heavier than expected, and that is a legitimate reason to choose a processor model.

Fiat payout is also a gap to plan around. SEPA payout is on inzi's roadmap but is not a shipped feature, so a business that must receive euros or dollars in a bank account today will route stablecoins through its own off-ramp.

What about batch payouts, API, and webhooks?

Payments in are only half of many digital businesses. If you also pay contractors, creators, or suppliers in stablecoin, the plan structure matters.

• Starter ($0/month): no subscription, aimed at small merchants.
• Growth ($49/month): adds batch payouts, for businesses paying many recipients.
• Scale ($149/month): aimed at high-volume merchants. Its call to action is contact sales, not self-serve signup.

The per-transaction fee is 0% on all three, so moving up a plan changes features and fit, not a percentage. For payroll-style flows, the crypto payroll guide covers the mechanics of paying a team in stablecoin.

Developers integrating the API can check details against the live documentation, since webhooks, retries, and confirmation semantics are exactly the kind of detail that differs between vendors and changes over time.

How do you choose between inzi and a processor model?

A short decision path, in the order the questions usually resolve:

1. Do your customers pay in stablecoins you can match to chains? Check the per-chain table above. If a required token and chain pair is missing, the decision ends there.
2. Do you want funds to arrive in a wallet you control? If yes, a non-custodial gateway fits. If a provider should handle settlement and conversion, a processor model fits.
3. Can your team run wallet security? If not, the processor model removes that burden at the cost of holding funds in someone else's system for a period.
4. Do you need fiat in a bank account today? A processor may cover this. With inzi, the route is your own off-ramp.
5. Does flat or percentage pricing suit your volume? Run your own monthly figures through both. See inzi's pricing for the three plans.

Bookkeeping also differs by model. With funds arriving on-chain at your own wallet, each payment is a transaction record on a public ledger, which many accountants use as the source document. The crypto accounting guide for stablecoin payments covers what that record typically contains.

Ready to test a non-custodial setup?

Starter has no subscription, so trying inzi with a wallet and a small test payment costs nothing beyond network gas. You can register and connect a wallet, run a payment on the chain your customers already use, and compare the result against your current BitPay flow with your own figures.

If your volume points to Scale, that plan goes through sales rather than self-serve signup, so the conversation starts from your actual transaction profile.