PayPal sucks if you're not American

February 6, 2026 @ 16:11

Depending on what platform you sell the things you make on, you may come in contact with PayPal. In fact you probably will. They're everywhere. PayPal seems to be good as long as you're American. Most people already use your currency so there's no conversion fees, and you can withdraw any amount of money at any time. That's not the same here in Canada, and it really pisses me off.

Currency conversion

PayPal charges a 2.5% fee to convert your currencies. This means that in order to get my money as CAD, I need to give them an extra cut. It would seem less infuriating if this was the only way they make money off of me, but they're literally the payment processor and already take a cut of my money. Additionally you may argue there could be transactional fees they can't control, but I highly doubt that considering my own bank charges 0% fees for currency conversion. I can even pay directly with my bank card in another currency, and they just convert it without extra fees. Keep this in mind.

Transferring money

PayPal also doesn't want you to take money out of your account, preferably. In Canada, you must have a balance of at least $25 CAD in order to withdraw. This doesn't sound like a lot, but USD withdrawals have no minimum and neither form of transfer has any fees unless you want it expedited (though 1-3 days is standard for EFT bank-stuff anyway). Despite this, if you have auto-transfer turned on, it will forcibly convert all currencies to CAD, and then leave them in your account. I have "convert currency" turned off in the auto transfer settings, but it does that anyway.

USD bank accounts

In Canada it's not uncommon for banks to provide some sort of USD account, and I have one. Additionally they can perform all standard banking actions including EFT transfers between banks and wire (in some cases, not mine). Cool. I'll just connect that and-- Oh. Wait. PayPal explicitly states on the account connecting page that you CAN'T use Canadian USD accounts. The only reason for this I can think of is the loss of conversion fees. Stripe allows this, I typically connect multiple bank accounts to Stripe for payouts depending on currency. The only way for me to get a payout in USD with less fees is to get my money as USD, pass it through Wise which I have for Steam so they can perform wire transfers in USD, and then have Wise convert it to CAD and deposit to me. They still have fees, but it's significantly lower in higher volumes.

I thought I could at least automate deposits in USD to my Wise account, but they don't even let you do that. In Canada you are only allowed a CAD and USD balance. Only the CAD one is allowed auto transfers. That's just the rules.

Oh and, PayPal just arbitrarily decides sometimes I can't spend money from my balance? Especially on Bandcamp, so I actually have money sitting in there that I can't do anything with.

Conclusion

Some of this may seem petty, like one should not be surprised when the large company wants to collect extra fees where possible, but those aren't fees that Americans deal with anywhere near as much, and the fact that my money has been run through it multiple times without my consent just annoys me a lot. They also apply a bunch of extra friction to the whole process of getting your money out of PayPal, that really just makes it feel horrible to try to use for anything productive.

Anyway that's my rant, not to mention PayPal is also just not a good company, doing things like building an ad network using the data Honey collects after paying hundreds of people to tell us they don't make money off of selling your data. Not a fan.

Also Itch & Routenote and stuff, you guys should totally look into getting Stripe Express for your payouts. Or like Wise or something maybe. Itch has normal Stripe for payments that are sent directly to the developers, but if you want your payouts collected by Itch (which I very much do, I have no clue how to remit taxes. I think even though I'm Canadian I'm still supposed to pay the EU VAT for European payments?) it's either PayPal or Payoneer, which will charge fees for inactivity and is meant more for professional corporate stuff.