August 9, 2026
Crypto Payment Gateway: What It Really Costs and How to Connect It
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A self-hosted crypto payment gateway costs no percentage: BTCPay Server and similar open source projects charge 0% and send the money straight to your own wallet. But the percentage is the only thing you stop paying. The server, the nodes, the keys, the checks on incoming money and the refunds become your job, and they cost money and a developer's time.
A hosted gateway costs around 1% of each payment and takes that work off you. So the short answer: self-hosting pays off when you take mostly bitcoin, turnover is large enough for 1% to hurt, and someone on the team will own the gateway like any other production system. If you want USDT, instant conversion to stable money and no night shifts, a hosted gateway is usually cheaper in total.
Below is what each road puts on your plate and how to count the bill. Figures are as of September 2026.
A self-hosted gateway is a program you run on your own server. It creates an invoice for each order, shows the customer an address and an amount, watches the blockchain for the payment and tells your store when the order is paid.
To watch the blockchain, the gateway needs a node: a copy of the network's ledger that your server keeps up to date. The money itself lands in wallets whose keys belong to you. Nobody in the middle holds it.
That is what non-custodial means: you hold the keys, so only you can move the funds. A custodial gateway works the other way round: the service receives the money, keeps it on its books and pays it out to you. Hosted gateways come in both kinds, so it is worth asking any service which one it is.
The open source projects on GitHub all sit on the first side. Think of them as a cash register you install yourself: the register is free, but the shop floor, the lock on the till and the person counting the takings are yours to provide.
With a hosted gateway, most of the work below happens on the service's side. With your own, each item is a task with an owner on your team.
Someone has to rent the server, install the gateway, point a domain at it and keep it patched. Most open source gateways ship as Docker containers, which makes installing easier, not maintaining. When checkout goes down on a Saturday, it is your developer who gets the call, not a support desk.
Every network you accept needs a connection to that network. For bitcoin, BTCPay Server runs its own node, and a trimmed "pruned" node fits on a modest server.
USDT is heavier. To follow payments on TRON, you either run a TRON full node, which by the network's own documentation needs at least 8 cores, 16 GB of memory and 3 TB of SSD, or you pay an outside provider for access to theirs. The BTCPay Server USDT plugin states plainly that its default public TRON connection is for testing only and can delay payment detection in production.
Non-custodial means the keys are yours, and so is the loss if they go. A lost seed phrase, the set of words that restores a wallet, means lost money, and a leaked one means somebody else's money. A business usually settles three questions in advance:
One common answer to all three is to split signing power between several people with a multisig wallet for the business.
The gateway accepts whatever arrives. If a customer pays with coins linked to theft or a sanctioned address, they now sit in your wallet, and an exchange may freeze them when you try to cash out. With your own gateway, screening incoming payments is a separate tool you pick, pay for and wire in yourself, and it helps to know how a crypto risk score and AML wallet check work.
A crypto payment cannot be pulled back by the sender. A customer who sends 99 USDT for a 100 USDT invoice, pays twice or pays after the invoice expired needs a person on your side to decide and send money back by hand. The gateway flags the case; the rules for overpayments, underpayments and mistaken transfers are yours to write.
Bitcoin paid on Monday may be worth less on Friday. A self-hosted gateway keeps what the customer sent, in the coin they sent. If you want stable money, you move it to an exchange and sell it yourself, paying the network fee and the exchange fee along the way.
The software is free. Running it is not. Here is where the money goes:
So "0% fees" is true about the gateway's charge per payment. It says nothing about what running the gateway costs you.
A hosted crypto payment processor takes a good part of that list off your team:
What stays with you depends on the service, so ask each one how it handles refunds and wrong amounts.
Hosted services charge a percentage of each payment, usually around 1%. At CryptumPay, for example, it is 1% per successful payment, from 0.5% on large volumes, and the fee can be passed on to the customer. The details that decide the real price, such as conversion, withdrawals and minimums, are where hosted services differ most, and here is what a crypto payment gateway costs in full and how you connect it.
The trade-off is control. You depend on the service staying up, and with a custodial service your money sits on its books until you withdraw. If your developer is going to wire one in, go through what to check in a crypto payment API before connecting.
Put the percentage next to the running costs, and turnover decides most of it.
A store taking $5,000 a month in crypto pays a hosted gateway about $50 a month at 1%. The cheapest server for a self-hosted gateway already costs $10 to $70, before a single hour of developer time. Self-hosting does not pay off here.
A store taking $100,000 a month pays about $1,000 a month at 1%. That budget covers a server, a screening tool and part of a developer's time, so self-hosting starts to make sense, especially if customers pay mostly in bitcoin. Add USDT on TRON and the bill for nodes or a provider grows again.
You can, but building one from scratch is a bigger project than self-hosting an open source one. Your team would have to write, test and keep working everything BTCPay Server and its peers already have:
That is months of developer work before the first payment, and the upkeep afterwards is the same as for any self-hosted gateway. For a merchant, the sensible version of "build your own" is to install an open source gateway and extend it where you need to.
A company that wants to offer crypto payments to many merchants under its own name faces another decision: whether to build or buy stablecoin payments as a payment provider.
Here are three open source projects on GitHub that a merchant can run on their own server:
"Best" depends on what your customers pay with. If it is mostly bitcoin, BTCPay Server is the natural first look, because bitcoin is what its core team works on. If it is mostly USDT, check which networks each project supports and who maintains that part.
Self-hosting fits when these conditions all hold:
A hosted gateway fits better when any of these is true:
It does not have to be forever. Many businesses start hosted, see how much comes in, and self-host later when the numbers justify it. To compare hosted options side by side, see ten crypto payment processors compared by total cost.
CryptumPay is a hosted option, and two of the heaviest tasks above, conversion and screening, sit on its side. Incoming payments are converted as soon as they arrive, so the balance never sits in a volatile coin; suspicious funds are caught and held before they reach the merchant's balance. The store connects through payment links, a widget or an API.
The open source gateway is free; running it is not. Self-hosting trades a percentage of each payment for a server, nodes, keys, screening and refunds that your team owns. It pays off at high turnover, mostly in bitcoin, with a developer who has time for it. Below that, or with USDT, a hosted gateway at around 1% usually costs less in total.
Bitcoin, both on-chain and over the Lightning Network, is the core. Other coins such as Litecoin and Monero come as optional integrations maintained by their own communities, and USDT works through a plugin on TRON, Ethereum and Polygon. Support for anything except bitcoin depends on those community maintainers.
A server with at least 4 GB of memory, 2 virtual cores and 50 GB of SSD for a bitcoin-only setup with a pruned node, plus Docker and a domain name. Each extra coin or Lightning adds storage and memory. If you would rather not run a server, the project also lists third-party hosts that run an instance for you.
Among open source projects, SHKeeper and Bitcart are the closest, both self-hosted and both covering USDT. The other alternative is a hosted crypto payment processor, where you pay a percentage instead of running the infrastructure.
Stripe is much more than software: it is a payment company with agreements with banks and card networks and a compliance team, and that takes years and large capital to build. For a merchant it is not a realistic project. Taking crypto is simpler, because no card network or bank sits in the middle.
A gateway is the technology that passes a payment from the customer to the merchant's account. An aggregator also lets many merchants accept payments under its own account, so a business can start without opening a merchant account of its own. Many hosted services combine both roles.
Create an account and connect the checkout yourself, or talk to sales and we will plan the integration with you.
