Pay It Now reviewed: broad crypto top-up, narrow map

Updated October 2026

Licensed

Available in US

Fast payouts

18+ Only

Pay It Now is a virtual, reloadable prepaid Mastercard that you fund from crypto and spend like an ordinary payment card. The part that works well is the funding side: more than fifty digital assets can be converted into USDC inside the app, which is a wider door than most cards in this category offer. The part that does not work well is the map. Today the card is offered only to PIN users in New Zealand and Australia, and there is no physical card, no ATM, and no new card can be added to Apple Pay since 11 May 2026. On my scoring it comes out at 5.6 / 10 — a genuinely useful tool for a specific person in a specific place, and not much more than that.

Conditions described here are current as of October 28, 2026.

Verdict: 5.6 out of 10

I scored it 5.6 / 10. The shape of that number matters more than the number itself, because the card is not weak everywhere — it is strong in one direction and thin in another. Funding gets the highest mark of anything I assessed. Eligibility gets the lowest. If your situation matches the shape of the card, the low overall score will feel irrelevant to you. If it does not, the high funding score will not help.

Who this suits. You live in New Zealand or Australia, you hold or receive crypto, and you want to spend it without going through an exchange account and a bank transfer every time. You are comfortable with a virtual-only card, you do not need cash from a machine, and Apple Pay is not your only way to pay. If that is you, this is a sensible tool and the funding breadth is the best thing about it.

Who this does not suit. Anyone outside those two countries right now. Anyone who needs a plastic card in a letterbox, or who takes cash out regularly. Anyone whose Apple Pay setup is the main way they pay — since 11 May 2026, new cards cannot be added there, though existing ones keep working. And anyone who wants to hold their own keys and is uneasy about a custodial balance.

Will they give you the card?

Only PIN users in New Zealand and Australia, at present. That is the whole eligibility statement as the card states it. The company says expansion “into other regions, including the U.S. and Europe” is being worked on — which is a statement of intent, not a timetable, and I would not plan a move or a currency switch around it.

If you are reading this from anywhere else, the honest answer is that the rest of the review is of limited use to you today. The features are real, the plumbing is real, but none of it is available to you. What you can usefully do with the rest of this page is understand how this category works, so that when a card does open up in your country you know which questions to ask before you sign up.

One thing worth knowing about the reason behind a decline. Card issuers run their own risk policy, and a card issued in one country can look unfamiliar to a merchant in another — the first six or eight digits of a card number identify the issuing institution and country, and shops can see that. That is a general feature of how cards work, not something specific to this card, but it is part of why cross-border eligibility rules exist in the first place.

How to get it

The route runs through the PIN Network app on iOS or Android. Open the app, go to the Cards section, apply, complete verification with the card provider, then top up. The card states that onboarding takes “just a few minutes”.

What you get is a virtual, reloadable prepaid Mastercard. There is no physical version: the card states delivery in ten minutes, meaning the card details appear in the app, and physical cards are not available at this time. You can create more than one virtual card from the same wallet, which is useful for separating subscriptions from day-to-day spending. The balance is USDC shown as US dollars. The card is issued by Immersve and distributed by Takeoff Media Limited — more on what that arrangement means for your money in the risk section below.

On verification, expect two layers rather than one. You complete the PIN Network check, and then the card provider runs its own KYC on top of it even if you have already been verified by PIN Network. The card’s public pages do not say which documents are required, what counts as proof of address, or what age applies, so I cannot tell you what to have ready. Plan on having your identity document and your address to hand, and accept that the specifics may only surface when you are inside the flow.

Fees and what a payment really costs

The headline is friendly: 5.00 USDC to issue, currently marked “FREE for a limited time”, no annual fee, and cancelling is free. That limited-time wording is the thing to watch. It is a promotional price with an end date the card does not print, so build your thinking on the 5.00 USDC figure and treat “free” as today’s luck.

Limits per KYC level are not stated. There is a single tier, so there is nothing to upgrade to and nothing that changes if you verify more thoroughly.

Now let me follow three ordinary payments through that table, because the fee structure behaves differently depending on what you are buying.

Coffee in Wellington, priced in local currency. The card balance is USDC. Buying in local currency means both a conversion at the app’s spread and the 1.5% fee for a non-USD purchase. Two charges, both small, neither hidden — but on a four-dollar coffee they are the whole cost of the convenience.

A monthly subscription in US dollars. No conversion, because the balance is already in dollars, and no 1.5%, because the purchase is in USD. This is the cheapest possible version of using this card, and it is the case the pricing was clearly built around.

A hotel in yen or euros. The 1.5% applies, the spread applies, and the amount is comfortably under the USD 20,000 daily transaction limit unless you are booking something very large. On a large booking the 1.5% becomes a number you would notice.

Two general points. First, the spread is not printed anywhere — you read it in the app at the moment of conversion, which means it is the one number you cannot check in advance and cannot argue with afterwards. Second, on-chain network fees when you deposit are charged by the blockchain, not by the card provider, so they do not appear in this table at all, but they are a real cost of funding.

How to top it up

This is the strong part, and it is why the card scored 9 out of 10 here. You fund from the PIN Wallet using more than fifty digital assets — the FAQ puts it at forty-plus, the main material at fifty-plus — including BTC, ETH, SOL, USDT, TRX and BNB. Whatever you send is converted to USDC, which becomes the balance the card spends.

Deposits go through a Web3 smart contract and can take up to ten minutes. Maximum top-up is USD 5,000 per day, with an annual value-load ceiling of USD 100,000. There is no separate deposit fee, though the spread still applies because that is the conversion itself. A minimum is not stated, and a direct fiat top-up is not stated either — the documented path is from crypto already in your PIN Wallet.

Two practical warnings, both general to this category rather than to this card. The first is network choice. Blockchain transfers are irreversible: send on a network the provider does not support, or to an address belonging to a different network, and the money can be gone, recoverable only through a manual support request with no guarantee. This matters concretely with USDC — Circle stopped supporting USDC on Tron in February 2024, so “USDC over TRC20” is not a native option here, even though TRX itself is listed among the supported assets. Check the network in the app before you confirm, not after.

The second is that a transfer taking ten minutes is a transfer taking ten minutes. If you are standing at a till with an empty balance, that gap is real.

Withdrawing works in two directions — back to the app wallet, or to a bank account. A withdrawal to the PIN Wallet costs a fixed 0.2 USDC. Worth noting: the balance is held by Takeoff Media, so money on the card is money held by a company, not by a bank, and that has consequences I will come back to.

Paying with it every day

In the app it is an ordinary Mastercard with an ordinary balance. You can pay online or in store, you can add the card to Google Pay, and multiple virtual cards can exist side by side.

Apple Pay is the snag. Since 11 May 2026, adding new cards has been unavailable “until further notice” — the card states this plainly. Cards you added before that date are unaffected and keep working. So if you already have it in Apple Pay, you are fine; if you are setting it up now, Google Pay is your route, or you use the card number directly. Blocked merchant categories are not stated.

You can also freeze and cancel the card inside the app, set a PIN, and review transactions — the ordinary safety furniture. Rewards are not stated, so if a cashback programme is the reason you are considering this, there is nothing documented to support that.

There is no ATM and no physical card, so cash is simply not part of this product. In New Zealand and Australia, where card acceptance is broad, that is a smaller problem than it would be elsewhere, but it is a real adjustment for anyone used to taking money out.

One payment behaviour to expect in general with prepaid or foreign-issued cards: some merchants decline them, because the card lookup reveals both the card type and the country of issue. Address verification, which compares the numeric parts of the billing address with the issuer’s records, is mostly offered in the US, Canada and the UK and is often unavailable on foreign-issued cards, which can cause declines. And a declined payment can leave a hold on your funds for several days — typically up to seven — which on a card with a USD 5,000 daily load limit is worth remembering.

What can go wrong

The complaints are the most informative thing on this page, so I will give them their weight rather than burying them. On Trustpilot, read 21 October 2026, the card sits at 4.0 out of 5 from 13 reviews — 77% five-star — and the company has not replied to negative reviews. Thirteen reviews is a very small sample and I would not treat the average as a measured quality score. But the themes underneath it are specific: unresponsive support in February, April and July 2026; unexplained loss of funds in July 2026; an unclear spread and an unanswered enquiry in April 2026. Losses of funds and unanswered support are the two complaints worth sitting with.

Who you are actually dealing with is worth spelling out. Pay It Now NZ LTD holds New Zealand FSP 1002374. Pay It Now AUS PTY LTD holds AFSL 700050 and AUSTRAC DCE100820697-002. Takeoff Media Limited is an Authorised Representative, 1313795, and it is the entity that holds your balance. The card itself is issued by Immersve, AFSL 545925. There are real licences here, and the separation between the brand, the distributor and the issuer is normal for this category. The consequence for you is that a dispute about your balance sits with Takeoff Media, while the card itself is Immersve’s instrument and Mastercard’s network carries the payments.

The structural risk follows from that. Your USDC balance is held by a company, and whether customer funds are safeguarded — segregated in dedicated accounts or insured — is not stated. That is a genuine gap in what the public pages tell you. In the EU, e-money institutions must safeguard customer funds; that rule is not what governs a New Zealand or Australian arrangement. Broadly, custodial platforms have a poor record: Mt. Gox, Coincheck and Ronin Network between them account for reported losses in the hundreds of millions. Your funds on a custodial card carry the same counterparty and hack risk as any custodial balance.

KYC is where accounts stall. Anti-money-laundering rules require regulated businesses to verify customers and keep monitoring transactions, and if due diligence cannot be completed, the institution is expected to hold off on the transaction or relationship. That is the normal reason an account gets frozen pending documents — usually routine, occasionally permanent. The card’s public pages do not say what happens after its two verification layers, or what evidence it asks for.

Getting money back after a problem is also unresolved on paper. There is a “Report” button under the transaction in the app, which opens a support ticket. The chargeback process and time frames are not stated. Support is ticket-based at support.payitnow.io, with a status page, no phone line, and languages and hours not stated. If you are outside business hours in your own timezone, that matters. One review of a 2026 closure of another crypto programme reported new loads ending 8 July and spending stopping 8 August — that is a single unconfirmed secondary source, but it illustrates the pattern: a programme winds down, then asks you to withdraw what is left.

And the category carries history that is worth knowing before you commit money. Visa terminated its global agreements with FTX on 13 November 2022 and the FTX US debit card was wound down. Visa suspended WaveCrest in Europe in 2018, closing every WaveCrest-issued programme. Neither of those is a prediction about this card. They are reminders that the card network can switch a programme off regardless of how well the front end is working.

What to take instead

None of the three below beats Pay It Now on funding breadth, and all three are more open on geography. I am comparing them on what their own pages state.

Cardex — also 5.6 / 10. One crypto card, “200+ countries”, with no country list or exclusions published, though its App Store listing is Naira-focused and pays in Naira. It is a debit crypto card running on VERVE, Visa, Mastercard and UnionPay, with both virtual and physical cards. Conversion happens at the moment of payment, and the site describes an “AI-Powered Conversion Rate” that scans exchange rates and picks the best at the point of spend — no fee percentage is stated. Funded from USDT, USDC and BTC wallets, networks not stated. If you want a physical card and a wider map, this is the one to look at; if you want to know the fee before you spend, you will not find it on the page.

CardFlow — 4.9 / 10. Aimed squarely at Nigeria, described as “Nigeria’s smartest fintech card platform” for “Nigerians and global users”, with no country list or exclusions stated. A virtual US Mastercard, created in three minutes. Creating a virtual card is free per their FAQ. Fees are not stated. Funding from Bitcoin, USDT, ETH or a Naira bank transfer. The honest read is that this is a Nigeria-first product, and if that is where you are, a free virtual card is a real advantage over paying 5.00 USDC.

HyperCard — 4.7 / 10. Official pages state no country list; the App Store says the card works in “more than 176 countries”, which is about where it is accepted, not who can hold it. A prepaid card whose network is not stated on the App Store page, balance in USD or EUR, funded by depositing crypto such as USDT, BTC or ETH in the app. No fees are listed on the pages. EUR balances are the distinguishing feature here — for a euro-zone user, that avoids the 1.5% non-USD penalty entirely.

The pattern across all four is worth noticing: three of them do not publish their fee percentage. Pay It Now’s 1.5% plus a visible in-app spread is, on disclosure alone, the most straightforward of the group. That is not the same as being cheapest, but it is the one you can actually plan around.

Who I would recommend it to

If you are in New Zealand or Australia, you already use crypto, and you want a spending card that draws on that crypto without converting through an exchange every time — yes, take it. The funding options are the broadest I found, the setup is a few minutes, there is no annual fee, and if you spend in US dollars the transaction cost is just the spread.

If you are anywhere else, wait. Expansion is stated as an intention, and an intention has no date attached.

If you need cash, or you need a plastic card, or you are setting up Apple Pay from scratch right now, this is the wrong product today.

If you are the kind of person who wants custody of your own keys, understand what you are agreeing to: the balance is held by Takeoff Media, safeguarding is not stated, and withdrawals carry a 0.2 USDC fee to the PIN Wallet. Nothing about that is unusual for this category — it is what custodial cards are — but it should be a decision, not a detail you skim past.

Before you fund it more than a small amount, I would do three things. Check the spread in the app at the moment you convert, so you know the real cost rather than the headline. Keep the card’s balances small enough that a support failure would not hurt you, given the specific reports of lost funds and unanswered tickets on Trustpilot. And note the date — new Apple Pay cards have been unavailable since 11 May 2026, and “until further notice” is not a schedule.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Pay It Now card?

Pay It Now is a virtual, reloadable prepaid Mastercard that spends a USDC balance shown in US dollars. You load it from crypto inside the PIN Network app, and it behaves like an ordinary payment card online and in store. It is issued by Immersve and distributed by Takeoff Media Limited. There is no physical version — the card arrives as details in the app, in ten minutes.

Is Pay It Now a bank?

No. It is a card programme rather than a bank account. Pay It Now NZ LTD holds a New Zealand financial services provider licence, Pay It Now AUS PTY LTD holds an Australian financial services licence, and the card is issued by Immersve. Your balance is held by Takeoff Media Limited, not deposited with a bank, so it is not a bank deposit and should not be treated as one.

Which countries can I use it in?

You can be approved if you are a PIN user in New Zealand or Australia, which is where the card is currently offered. The company says expansion into other regions, including the United States and Europe, is being worked on, but no date is given. Note the separate question of where the card is accepted once issued: that is broader than where you can hold it.

How much does it cost to open and use?

Issuance is 5.00 USDC deducted from your app wallet balance, shown as “FREE for a limited time” — so do not plan on it staying free. There is no annual fee and cancellation is free. Purchases in currencies other than USD carry a 1.5% transaction fee with no separate FX fee, and crypto conversion is charged through the spread shown in the app.

What are the limits?

Daily transactions are capped at USD 20,000 and yearly transactions at USD 100,000. Loading value is capped at USD 5,000 per day and USD 100,000 per year. There is a single tier with no level progression, and the card’s pages do not state limits per verification level, so the figures above are what is documented.

How do I top it up?

From the PIN Wallet, using more than fifty digital assets — the FAQ says forty-plus — including BTC, ETH, SOL, USDT, TRX and BNB, which are converted to USDC. Deposits go via a Web3 smart contract and can take up to ten minutes. The maximum is USD 5,000 per day. Check the network before you send: transfers are irreversible, and USDC on Tron is not supported natively.

Can I add it to Apple Pay?

Not at the moment. Since 11 May 2026, adding new cards in Apple Pay has been unavailable “until further notice”, according to the card itself. Cards added before that date still work. Google Pay is compatible, and you can also enter the card details directly — which is the practical answer for new users today.

Does it require KYC, and is it safe?

Yes, and it needs two passes: the PIN Network check, then a further KYC through the card provider even if you have already verified with PIN. The app offers in-app card cancellation, a PIN, transaction monitoring and a security guide. Your balance is custodial — held by Takeoff Media — and safeguarding is not stated, so treat it as money held by a company.

How do I dispute a transaction or get money back?

Use the “Report” button under the transaction in the app, which opens a support ticket. Support is ticket-based with a status page and no phone line; languages and hours are not stated. The chargeback process and time frames are not stated either. Note that Trustpilot reviews from 2026 include reports of unresponsive support and unexplained loss of funds, which is worth weighing before you hold a large balance.

Is it worth it?

For a New Zealand or Australia resident who spends crypto regularly and lives without cash or Apple Pay, yes — broad asset support, no annual fee, and a low transaction cost on US-dollar spending. For anyone else, no, not today. It is virtual only, limited to two countries, without an ATM, and new Apple Pay additions are paused. Compare it against a physical or multi-country card before you commit.

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