A cheap Lite plan, expensive everywhere else

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

LinkPay sells itself as a crypto payment card, and on the surface it delivers on that: you send stablecoins to a wallet, spend the balance on a virtual card, and the card behaves like any other online card. Underneath, though, the picture is messier. The service is virtual-only, the fees run from free to punishing, the public fee figures disagree with each other, and the people who have written in publicly are mostly unhappy. My score is 5.0 out of 10 — a working card wrapped in a lot of unanswered questions.

Conditions are current as of October 28, 2026.

Who this suits: anyone who cannot get an ordinary bank card, who is comfortable sending crypto to a custodial wallet, and who is testing an idea rather than running their life through it. Who it does not suit: anyone who needs a physical card, anyone who must add it to a phone wallet, anyone who wants predictable fees, and anyone who would rather keep their money in a wallet they control. One more group to keep in mind: advertisers and agencies who need to spin up a lot of virtual cards at once — the plan tiers and card allowances are built for exactly that, even if the everyday features are thin.

Scorecard

I break a card down into six things that actually decide whether it is usable, then weight them into one number. Here is where LinkPay landed, with my reasons.

Read the spread, not just the total. A 9 on access and a 2 on everyday use is the shape of this card: easy to get into, thin on the things you touch every day. The 3 on cost and the 3 on reliability are what pull the total down to the middle.

Who will give you the card

Access is the strongest thing here. LinkPay is open in a very large number of countries, and the Terms bar residents and citizens of a listed set. That list is stated as “not exhaustive”, which is worth pausing on: a country missing from the page today could be added later, and the page itself does not promise it is complete.

The official line is that the service is not provided in 27 listed countries. Among them are the Russian Federation and Belarus, and also Hong Kong, the United States, Ukraine, Iran, Cuba, Syria, North Korea and others. The Terms go further and separately bar residents and citizens of the listed countries. On top of that, US citizens, permanent residents and US entities cannot open accounts. That is three separate restrictions in one corner of the world — residence, citizenship, and entity — and it means someone in the United States on a US passport is excluded whether they live in New York or Lisbon. If you are outside that set, the published country list is the only screen you get; I would re-read it before you fund anything, because it can change.

Wider figures for availability come from third parties rather than LinkPay’s own pages, and I have not confirmed them on the card’s site: those sources put availability at 168 countries with 28 restricted, and Russia as restricted (per CryptoCardHub, 11 Aug 2026). Treat those numbers as unofficial colour, not as LinkPay’s promise. They are also inconsistent with the official 27-country list in ways that suggest the two are measuring different things.

What the card does not tell you on the eligibility page is its own onboarding and identity rules; the page links to an “Anti Money Laundering” page whose contents are not shown. So the country screen is the one screen you can read; the KYC screen you have to enter to see. That is a small thing to be dissatisfied about, but it is exactly the kind of thing you want to know before you upload a passport, not after.

In short: broad access, a clearly stated but non-exhaustive exclusion list, and a strong US carve-out. For the reader who simply cannot get a bank card and is not caught by the list, eligibility looks favourable.

How to get it

Signing up is digital from the start. The card itself is virtual — the page says “Virtual card for all purchases” — and no physical card is offered on the site. The network and card currency are not stated on that page; third-party sources put the cards on Visa or Mastercard networks, but I have not confirmed that against LinkPay’s own material, so treat it as unofficial until you see it in the app.

The heart of the application is verification, and LinkPay runs three levels rather than one. They are the real gate to the card, and each level buys you more room:

• No verification — up to $500 a month, and only advertising cards.
• Basic — up to $2,000 a month, all card types except Apple Pay and Google Pay, and it needs your full name, address and ID details.
• Unlimited — no spend ceiling and no card-type limits, and it needs a photo of a valid ID plus a live check.

The limits are monthly spend limits, and the tiers map onto them cleanly: $500 unverified, $2,000 at Basic, unlimited once you are fully verified. Users holding more than 100 cards can ask support for custom limits. That last point tells you who the product is built for — ordinary people do not have 100 cards.

Timing is the other thing to watch. Verification is generally completed within 24 hours, but “can take longer” is in the same breath, and rejected documents can be sent to manual review. The official reasons for rejection are not listed beyond the general requirement of “valid documents with clear photos”. A rejected document is therefore a black box: you are told your papers were not accepted, not necessarily why. If your situation is one where a document is marginal, expect the slow path rather than the fast one.

So the honest picture: no physical card, a three-step identity ladder, a 24-hour target that can stretch, and an unpublished rejection criteria list. If your documents are clean and straightforward, this is a same-week process; if they are not, budget for a manual review you cannot predict.

Fees: what it really costs

The headline that pulls people in is that the Lite plan is free. The catch is that Lite charges 2% per transaction with a $2 minimum, and every paid plan charges a monthly subscription on top of a per-payment fee. Worse, the numbers on LinkPay’s marketing pages and the numbers in its Terms of Service disagree in several places, and I have not found a page that resolves which is binding. Treat every figure below as “one of two published values” where I say so.

The plans themselves are Lite, Plus, Pro and Ultra. Here is the picture, with both sets of figures where they conflict:

Two rows in that table deserve your attention because they are not small discrepancies. First, the Ultra price: the home page says $209/month while the Terms say $299/month, with a matching difference in free cards (79 vs 100). A forty-thousand-dollar-a-year gap in interpretation is not a rounding error. Second, the withdrawal and decline fees: the home page charges real percentages for withdrawals, while the Terms say withdrawal is free on every plan. Those two stories cannot both be operational.

Other cost lines the card simply does not publish: there is no ATM fee to quote because there are no physical cards and, per unofficial sources, no ATM access at all; there is no FX fee stated; and card currency is not stated — the FAQ says USD cards are “planned to release soon”, implying other currencies exist or will, without saying which. Spend limits and card-per-issue pricing on Lite are also not stated on the pages.

Now let me make the fees concrete, because percentages only hurt when you point them at a real purchase. Take a $100 basket, funded from crypto, on the free Lite plan:

• A $100 online purchase. The transaction fee is 2% with a $2 minimum, so $2. You spend $102 of your balance to buy $100 of things. If the merchant treats the card as foreign and declines it, the home page would add another 2% — $2 — for the decline.
• A $10 coffee. The 2% here is 20 cents, but the $2 minimum kicks in, so you pay $2 in fee on a $10 drink — a 20% effective charge. The minimum is what makes Lite punishing on small purchases.
• A $40 subscription. $2 in fees on $40 is 5% of the basket. If you stack several small recurring charges on Lite, the minimums add up faster than the percentages suggest.

On Pro or Ultra the same $100 purchase costs $1 in transaction fee, and the small-purchase problem mostly disappears because there is no minimum. That is the trade the paid plans are selling: not more card features, but the absence of a fee floor. The cashback offsets a little of it on the two upper tiers — 1% on Pro, 2% on Ultra as advertised — but it is a rebate on a purchase you already paid to make, and the currency of the payout is not stated.

The card is also free to freeze and unfreeze only on subscription or custom plans, so the free plan does not come with that convenience. Whether Lite is genuinely free depends on what you buy: nothing if you do not spend, quietly expensive the moment you do.

Top up: how the money gets in

LinkPay is a crypto-only product as far as funding goes. The site advertises deposit options for 7+ digital currencies, and fiat funding and an on-ramp are “planned” rather than available. Third-party sources name BTC and USDT among the coins and mention the TRC20 and BTC networks, but LinkPay’s own pages do not name the coins or the networks, so that is unofficial colour too. With no bank transfer option reported by those sources either, your only route in is crypto you already hold.

Two practical rules come from the Terms. First, there is an activation minimum shown in your dashboard before the card is issued, “usually around $15”; if your deposit is below the minimum, issuance fails. So a first top-up has to clear that floor, and the floor is disclosed in the dashboard rather than in advance — you find out your own threshold by looking. Second, confirmations differ by network: 20 for TRC20, from 4 for BTC. That is a real difference in waiting time, and it is network-dependent in a way you control only by choosing the chain.

The deposit fee depends on your plan: 1% on Lite, 0.75% on Plus, and free on Pro and Ultra according to the home page — though the Terms list 0.5% on Pro, so Pro is either free or half a percent depending on which document you read. Who pays the blockchain’s own network fee for the deposit is not stated. If you are on Ethereum, that network fee is charged by the chain and can be the largest single cost of putting money in; if you are on Tron, it is far cheaper. Choosing the network is therefore the single cheapest fee lever you have.

Freezing funds or reversing a mistake has no cheap path. Withdrawals are requested from the Wallet and processed “during 10 working days”; the fee for them is free on all plans per the Terms, or 3% / 3% / 2% / 1% with minimums per the home page. Cashback cannot be withdrawn to a bank. If you close the account, remaining funds are sent to payment details you specify, minus fees. Records are kept 5 years. You cannot withdraw directly to a LinkPay card, though there is an internal peer-to-peer transfer by recipient email.

The honest summary: funding in is crypto-only, has a per-deposit fee on the lower plans, an activation minimum you discover in the dashboard, and confirmation times that depend entirely on the chain you pick. Getting money out is slower — “10 working days” — and its fee is one of the two contradictions above.

Paying with it every day

The daily experience is where this card is thinnest, and it is the reason my everyday-use mark is 2 out of 10. Every card is virtual. There is no physical card, so there is nothing to hand over at a terminal that refuses to take a screen. Apple Pay and Google Pay are “in final integration, will be available soon” — and even once they arrive, they are unavailable at Basic verification, so they belong to the fully verified tier. There is no ATM.

That means the phone-wallet route people actually use day to day is currently closed, and the Basic tier that most people reach first will not have it even after launch. Anyone who pays for parking, transport or a coffee tap — anything that wants a tap rather than a checkout — is not served by this card as it stands.

The app is where you live. It is on the App Store and Google Play, plus a direct .APK download, and the site does not show ratings, so I cannot tell you how people rate it. What the app does promise is reasonably concrete on the awkward moments: failed transactions with a pending authorisation return your funds in 5–10 minutes; merchant refunds usually land within 4 weeks; holds, such as those from ad platforms, usually clear in 10–14 days. Top-ups to an unverified card are auto-cancelled and refunded in 2–14 business days, while top-ups to a verified card are non-refundable — worth noting, because the moment you verify, your deposits stop being the safety net they were.

Rewards are thin. Cashback is 0% on Lite and Plus, 1% on Pro and 2% on Ultra — but the headline says “2% cashback for all payments”, which does not match the tier table, and the payout currency is not stated.

Two things the page does not cover that you would want to know: which merchant categories are blocked (the gambling category in particular is commonly blocked by issuer policy rather than law, and the blocked list is issuer-specific), and how chargebacks work at all — the FAQ describes no chargeback process, while separately making the customer responsible for chargebacks and disputed transactions. That combination — no stated dispute process, but liability on you — is the one to sit with.

The daily verdict: virtual-only, no phone wallet yet, no ATM, minimal rewards, and no published policy on blocked categories or chargebacks. It works for online checkout where a card number is typed. It does not yet work as a card you live on.

What can go wrong

Reliability is my 3-out-of-10 mark and the most important section of this review, because it is where the money actually goes missing.

The company behind the card is LinkPay, registered at Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, with money-services registration number M23039048. That registration is real, but the issuer or BIN sponsor behind the cards is not stated — so the institution that actually stands behind your balance is not named anywhere I could find. Many crypto cards work this way, with the brand as a programme manager in front of a licensed issuer, but it means the entity you would complain to is not the one whose name is on the card.

The complaints tell the story. On Trustpilot the score sits at about 2.3 out of 5 from 44 reviews, and about 4.7 out of 5 from ten reviews on other platforms. Support is described there as slow and repetitive. The specific user reports recur in a pattern: a card frozen before a transaction, reportedly unfrozen only after buying a paid plan; withdrawals stuck “processing” for four weeks or more; and waits of months for a card to be issued at all. The company’s own replies to those complaints cite security protocols and insufficient verification. A competitor, Halocard, has pointed to a banking partner that froze cards and withdrawals during a move to a new partner, with waits of approximately 3 months — treat that as a competitor’s framing, not established fact, and no date is shown.

The structural risks are real as well. LinkPay is custodial: your balance sits in the platform’s Wallet, and the Administrator may suspend all wallets without notice on suspicion or violation, and funds may be frozen during an investigation. Accounts lock after three failed login attempts. Freeze and unfreeze are only available on subscription or custom plans, so a free user who locks themselves out has fewer controls. The badges shown are GDPR, ISO and PCI DSS, and no insurance is stated.

How should you size this? Custodial platforms have a history: Mt. Gox (about $350 million reported stolen, 2011–2014), Coincheck (about $400 million, 2018), Ronin Network ($625 million, 2022). That is not a prediction about LinkPay — it is a reminder that holding funds with a custodian carries counterparty and hack risk, and that a custody wallet by definition can be frozen by the custodian. A seed phrase you hold yourself is different: anyone who obtains it can restore and spend, but no third party can freeze it. Both sides are real; the point is that with LinkPay the freeze button is not in your hand.

The recurring complaints — frozen cards, four-week withdrawals, paid-plan unlock — are consistent with each other, and consistent with a young service learning its own support costs. What I cannot do is tell you they are resolved; they are the reason this section is the longest one here.

What to take instead

If LinkPay’s shape — broad access, custodial balance, virtual card, crypto-only funding — is what you need, these are the other options I looked at. Scores are on the same ten-point scale.

Cardex — 5.6 / 10. One crypto card, 200+ countries, with no country list or exclusions published. It is a debit crypto card on the VERVE, Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay networks, virtual and physical, and its App Store listing is Naira-focused. Funding is via USDT, USDC and BTC wallets, networks not stated. Pricing is not stated. Conversion happens at the moment of payment, and the site claims an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” that scans global exchange rates and picks the best one when you spend — but no fee percentage is given. Attractive if the physical card matters to you and the opaque fee does not.

TakeCard — 5.5 / 10. Countries are not listed in the help articles; the physical card is “available only to Bolivian users for now”, while the Takenos site says the wallet can receive payments “from any country”. The virtual card is available immediately, Visa, issued in the US, prepaid, USD at 1:1; the physical card is Bolivia. Cost is $5 virtual; physical $20 issuance plus $20 shipping in one article and $10 for physical Bolivia in another — conflicting. Commission is 1% per purchase; other currencies at the official Visa rate of the day. Top-up is from a Takenos balance; starting data mentions USDC/USDT via Polygon, BNB Chain, Tron or Ethereum, which I did not verify. Its 1% flat fee and physical option in Bolivia make it the most conventional of the three, but its geographic focus narrows who it is for.

OkiCard — 6.0 / 10. The highest score of the four, and for a specific reason: its fees are the clearest. “150+ countries” (some pages say “200+”), “no geo-blocking based on your passport”, users must confirm they are not in a sanctioned jurisdiction. Virtual card, network “Visa/Mastercard” not specified, currency USD/EUR. Pricing: issuance $0, monthly $0, starting price $15 for the virtual card — though the FAQ mentions a one-time issuance fee and the pages disagree. Load fee 3%, transaction fee in USD 0%, “no hidden exchange spreads”. Funding is USDT on BSC (BEP-20), Ethereum (ERC-20), Tron (TRC-20) and Solana (SPL); USDC “soon”, BTC and altcoins “coming soon”; deposits go to a generated address and convert at the moment of spending. No cashback mentioned. The 3% load fee is real, but a 0% USD transaction fee is the most honest structure on this list.

A quick comparison of what actually differs:

The pattern worth noticing: OkiCard publishes its numbers and takes a higher load fee in exchange; Cardex publishes an impressive rate mechanism but no percentage; TakeCard is the most conventional but geographically narrow; LinkPay offers the broadest access and the most free cards per plan, but the least trustworthy fee sheet. For the reader who wants a card that just charges a flat, known 1% and does not mind a Bolivia-style geographic limit, TakeCard is plainer. For the reader who will not read Terms and just wants the cheapest documented spend, OkiCard’s 0% USD transaction fee is the least surprising promise on the page.

Who I would recommend it to

I would recommend LinkPay to a specific person: someone who cannot get a normal bank card, who is already holding crypto, who is happy for a company to hold that crypto, and who wants a virtual card for online checkout — ideally someone with a reason to want a lot of cards at once, which is exactly what the team-member and card-allowance tiers are built for. If that is you, the free Lite plan is a low-cost way to find out whether the card is accepted where you shop, and the $15-ish activation minimum makes the experiment small.

I would not recommend it as your only card, and I would be careful with real money. The reasons are specific: virtual-only with no phone wallet yet, so it cannot replace your everyday card; a fee sheet that contradicts itself, so you cannot predict what a payment costs; a withdrawal process that runs to 10 working days with a disputed fee; and a complaints history dominated by frozen cards and stuck withdrawals on an unnamed issuer. Nobody at LinkPay has shown me anything I could call unsafe — I am not making that claim — but the combination of custody, a non-exhaustive country list, and unresolved support complaints is more risk than I would hold in steady.

And the alternative worth your attention is the more boring one. If OkiCard’s published 0% USD transaction fee and four-chain USDT funding fit your country and your documents, you are trading an opaque but cheap-and-broad card for a transparent one. That trade has been worth it for me every time. Either way, read the Terms yourself — for LinkPay more than most — before you send the first deposit.

Frequently asked questions

What is the LinkPay card?

LinkPay is a crypto payment card. You deposit digital currencies into a platform wallet and spend that balance through a virtual card at online merchants. It is a virtual-only product — the site does not offer a physical card — and it is positioned for people who want to pay online from crypto holdings rather than from a bank account.

How does the LinkPay card work?

You send crypto to a generated wallet address, wait for confirmations on the chosen network, and the balance becomes spendable through a virtual card. Deposits need to clear an activation minimum, “usually around $15”, before a card is issued. Confirmations take 20 on TRC20 or from 4 on BTC. You then type the card number at checkout like any other virtual card.

Is LinkPay a bank?

No — it is not a bank. The company is LinkPay, registered in Richmond, British Columbia, Canada, with money-services registration M23039048. The card’s actual issuing bank or BIN sponsor is not stated on its public pages, so the institution standing behind the balance is not the one named on the card.

Does the LinkPay card require KYC?

It depends on the level. Without verification you can spend $500 a month and get advertising cards only. Basic verification, needing your name, address and ID details, raises that to $2,000. Full verification — a photo of a valid ID plus a live check — removes the spend ceiling. Verification is usually done within 24 hours but can take longer.

Can I use the LinkPay card in my country?

It depends where you are. The service is officially not provided in 27 listed countries, including the Russian Federation, Belarus, Hong Kong, the United States, Ukraine, Iran, Cuba, Syria and North Korea, and that list is “not exhaustive”. Residents and citizens of listed countries are barred, and US citizens, permanent residents and US entities cannot open accounts at all. Wider figures of 168 countries are unofficial.

How much does the LinkPay card cost?

The Lite plan is free but charges 2% per transaction with a $2 minimum. Paid plans are Plus at $59/month, Pro at $179 and Ultra at $209 — though the Terms put Ultra at $299. Transaction fees fall to 1.5%, 1% and 1% on the paid plans. The catch is that the fees on the marketing pages and the figures in the Terms do not always match.

How do I top up the LinkPay card?

With crypto only — the site says deposit options for 7+ digital currencies, though it does not name them, and unofficial sources mention BTC and USDT. Fiat and on-ramp funding are “planned”. Deposit fees are 1% on Lite, 0.75% on Plus, and free on Pro and Ultra per the marketing pages, though the Terms list 0.5% on Pro.

Can I add the LinkPay card to Apple Wallet?

Not yet. Apple Pay and Google Pay are “in final integration, will be available soon”, so neither is usable at the moment. Even after they arrive, they are unavailable at Basic verification, meaning you would need full verification to use them. One unofficial third-party source contradicts this, saying selected virtual cards can already be added.

Is the LinkPay card safe?

I would not call it unsafe, but it carries real structural risk. It is custodial — the balance sits in LinkPay’s Wallet and the Administrator may suspend all wallets without notice on suspicion. The card is virtual-only, the issuer is not named, and public complaints include frozen cards and withdrawals stuck “processing” for four weeks or more, with Trustpilot at 2 out of 5.

Is the LinkPay card worth it?

Worth a small test, not worth relying on. The free Lite plan is a cheap way to see whether online merchants accept a card from this issuer, and the roughly $15 activation minimum keeps the experiment small. For daily use it falls short — virtual-only, no phone wallet yet, no ATM, and a fee sheet that contradicts itself. For a card to live on, this is not it.

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