I was sitting in a café in Amsterdam last month, trying to renew my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription before a client deadline. The invoice showed $69.99. No problem. I opened my ING banking app, approved the payment, and within seconds Adobe confirmed my subscription had been renewed.
Simple.
Or so I thought.
Later that evening, while reviewing my monthly expenses, I noticed the amount that had actually left my account wasn’t quite what Adobe had advertised. There wasn’t a failed payment or an error message. The payment had gone through perfectly. Yet somewhere between Adobe charging me in US dollars and my bank converting the payment into euros, I’d paid almost €11 more than I expected.
Eleven euros isn’t enough to ruin your day.
But it is enough to make you curious.
Because Adobe isn’t the only service I pay for in dollars.
Every month I pay for ChatGPT Plus, Canva Pro, Google Workspace, ElevenLabs, Envato Elements and a growing list of AI tools that have quietly become essential to my work. Then there are domain renewals, flights, hotel bookings, online courses and the occasional purchase from an American website.
Almost everything I rely on professionally is priced in USD.
Individually, those extra conversion costs seem insignificant.
Collectively?
They’re surprisingly expensive.
That evening I opened my banking app again and started adding everything together. I wasn’t looking at one expensive transaction anymore. I was looking at dozens of international payments spread across an entire month.
That’s when I realised something.
For years I’d spent time comparing software subscriptions.
ChatGPT versus Claude.
Canva versus Adobe Express.
Google Workspace versus Microsoft 365.
Yet I had never stopped to compare how I was paying for them.
A week later, while grabbing lunch with another freelancer in Rotterdam, I casually mentioned the unexpected conversion cost.
He laughed.
“You still use your regular bank card for international payments?”
I told him I did.
He immediately pulled out his phone and showed me a crypto card connected to his USDC wallet.
“I’ve been using this for over a year,” he said. “Much cheaper than my bank.”
Just a few days later, I was at a networking event in Utrecht when another creator offered a completely different opinion.
“Crypto? I gave up on that months ago,” she smiled.
“I switched to a Dollar Card instead. Less hassle, same idea.”
Now I was genuinely interested.
Two freelancers.
Two completely different payment methods.
The same promise.
Save money when paying internationally.
Rather than spending hours reading Reddit threads or watching YouTube comparisons, I decided to test both for myself.
For the next six months, I split almost every international payment between a Crypto Card and a Dollar Card.
Software subscriptions.
Flights.
Hotels.
Streaming services.
Online shopping.
Even everyday purchases while travelling across Europe.
The goal wasn’t simply to find the cheapest option.
It was to discover which one I’d actually trust every single day.
What I Was Paying For
Before starting the experiment, I calculated my average monthly international spending.
| Expense | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Adobe Creative Cloud | $69.99 |
| ChatGPT Plus | $20 |
| Canva Pro | $15 |
| Google Workspace | $14 |
| ElevenLabs | $22 |
| Envato Elements | $16.50 |
| Flights & Hotels (Average) | $350 |
| Online Shopping | $180 |
| Total | ≈ $688 |
That works out to more than $8,000 every year spent on products and services billed in US dollars.
Now imagine paying just 2% more than necessary on every transaction.
That’s over $160 every year disappearing purely through exchange rates and international payment costs.
Increase that to 4%, and you’re looking at more than $320.
Not because the software became more expensive.
Not because you bought anything extra.
Simply because of how you chose to pay.
At that point, comparing Crypto Card vs Dollar Card stopped being an interesting experiment.
It became a practical business decision.
My Six-Month Crypto Card Experiment
Like most people, I had heard plenty about crypto cards but never felt the need to try one. Friends spoke highly of spending USDC directly instead of converting euros every time they made an international payment. The promise sounded appealing: lower conversion costs, competitive exchange rates and greater control over foreign currency spending.
So I signed up for one.
The onboarding process wasn’t difficult, but it certainly wasn’t as straightforward as opening a regular bank account. After completing identity verification, setting up a crypto wallet and purchasing USDC through an exchange, I finally had a working crypto card.
For the next few months, I used it for almost everything.
ChatGPT Plus.
Adobe Creative Cloud.
Spotify.
Flight bookings.
Hotel reservations.
Online shopping.
At first, the numbers looked promising.
Because I was spending USDC directly, I avoided several of the conversion costs I normally experienced through my traditional bank. Exchange rates were noticeably better, and on larger purchases, the savings became more obvious.
For expensive hotel bookings and airline tickets, the difference wasn’t just a few cents. Sometimes I saved between €10 and €20 on a single purchase.
On paper, it felt like I’d found the answer.
But after a few months, I started noticing something the comparison tables never talk about.
Buying crypto isn’t free.
Loading the card isn’t always free.
Moving money between platforms sometimes incurs additional costs.
And perhaps most importantly, using a crypto card introduced an entirely new layer of complexity that simply didn’t exist with my normal banking app.
I also discovered that not every merchant treated crypto-backed cards equally. While most major subscription services worked without issue, a handful of online retailers and travel providers occasionally declined transactions or flagged them for additional verification.
None of these problems were deal-breakers.
But they were enough to make me wonder whether there was a simpler alternative that offered many of the same financial benefits without requiring me to think about wallets, exchanges and blockchain transfers.
That’s when I started testing Dollar Cards.
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