Lesson 3
Pay one cent
Online, almost nothing costs less than a dollar. That isn't because nobody wants to pay a few cents. It's because a card payment has a fixed fee, and at small prices that fee is bigger than the price.
Card fee: 2.9% + 30¢ per payment, the standard price of Stripe, a large US card processor. Other processors charge similar amounts.
Try it for real, on this site
Read the rest of an article for 1¢
The writer gets the whole cent. The text appears the moment the payment confirms.
Open an articlePlay an arcade round for 1¢
Put your score on the leaderboard and win tickets for prizes. Every game is also free to play.
Open the arcadeTo pay, you need a little Nano in a wallet. The easiest start is a purse on this site: you fill it once, and after that every payment is one click.
What tiny payments make possible
1 Pay for one thing, not a subscription
One article, one song, one photo, for a few cents, instead of another monthly plan.
2 Tip the people you like
Send 10¢ to a writer, a streamer or an artist, and all of it reaches them.
3 Let machines pay machines
An app or an AI assistant can pay a fraction of a cent for exactly what it uses, with no account and no card.