PayPal BTC Review: No Hold & Low Fee! (but some weird stuff)

This is gonna probably be pretty long because I'm honestly kind of excited. I'll include a TLDR toward the bottom.

I thought a review might be useful to some who don't like the temporary holds and higher fees on Coinbase and Kraken, and/or if Strike wouldn't let you have an account. I know hardly anyone uses PayPal to buy BTC because they didn't allow withdrawals, but apparently that changed in December 2022. I bought $20 as a test run a month or so ago but was unable to withdraw. After further research, that was because I was under the minimum withdrawal amount. This is a thorough review of everything that happens when you buy enough to hit the withdrawal threshold (0.001 BTC).

Okay, first the weird part: I have two debit cards linked to my PayPal account, each with money in the corresponding bank accounts. Despite this, sometimes when I go to buy they don't show up on the payment options pop-up. When this happens I just go back to Dashboard then back to Crypto and back to Buy again until they show up. Sometimes it takes a few times and sometimes they show up on the first attempt. This goes for both the website and the mobile app. I guess not enough people have complained about this yet for them to fix it.

Now the good part: the fee for buying is relatively low, depending on how much you buy. The fee for a $200 purchase, for example, is only $2.49. I'll include the full list at the bottom.

And the surprising part: there is no temporary hold on purchased BTC when you buy with a debit card, you get to withdraw it right after you buy it. Compared to debit purchases on Coinbase (7-day hold) and Kraken (3-day hold), this is a major plus in my book.

To be able to withdraw, I had to use the website. The security check just wasn't loading properly on mobile, so I went to the website on my laptop and verified via text message code. So again, they do need to fix their stuff up some.

My withdrawal fee was about 0.0009 BTC (around $2.40), which is also relatively low.

There were no other fees and I was able to buy it at what was the current BTC price. For this test run I spent $31.99. Instead of taking the original fee out of the purchase like most places, PayPal adds it to the amount you're buying- so I bought $30 worth of BTC and it was $1.99 for the fee (see fee list below). I ended up with a little over $27 worth of BTC on a $32 purchase, so the math adds up with no sneaky little surprises.

This was just a test run, so I wasn't concerned with the % return ($27 out of $32 is only about 84%). But using the fee schedule and what my withdraw ended up costing, we can see that one can buy $200 worth of BTC for $202.49 and then lose about $2.40 for the withdrawal and that would be a 97.5% return in BTC for your money after all (including withdrawal) is said and done.

TLDR/SUMMARY:

• It sometimes takes some effort to make your linked debit cards show up as payment options on the Buy screen. And I had to use the website to be able to verify for withdrawal, due to more technical difficulties with the app.

• If you buy a decent amount, you're only gonna lose a very small % of current value in the entire process (about 2.5% or less even including the withdrawal, which is smaller than Coinbase and Kraken).

• You can withdraw it immediately (if you pay with debit- I haven't tried paying with balance yet). Another win over Coinbase and Kraken.

FEE TREE:

$1-$4.99 = $0.49

$5-$24.99 = $0.99

$25-$74.95 = $1.99

$75-$200 = $2.49

$200.01-$1,000 = 1.8%

$1,000.01+ = 1.5%

Withdrawal = mine was about 0.00009