About BorderPaid

My name is Phan Trọng Hùng. I live in Da Nang, Vietnam, and I sell things online - two years buying Meta ads for a client and running my own direct-to-consumer stores, which means moving money in and out of this country every single month. You can check who I am: CV · LinkedIn.

Getting money into the country - and paying for things outside it - is the part nobody writes about honestly. So I started keeping notes. This site is those notes, cleaned up.

Two problems come up over and over for anyone in my position:

1. Money coming in. Stripe does not support Vietnam. Neither does Shopify Payments. PayPal works, but its Vietnam fee page lists 4.40% plus a fixed fee just to receive an international payment - before conversion and before withdrawal. So how does money from a US customer actually reach a Vietnamese bank account?
2. Money going out. Ads, software, domains, hosting - all billed in USD, all charged to a card issued in a country the biller has barely heard of.

Every guide I found was written by someone in New York or London for whom none of this is a problem. That is the gap this site is trying to fill.

Who this is for

People earning in dollars while living somewhere the financial system treats as an afterthought - Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia, Egypt. Freelancers, store owners, affiliates, creators. Anyone who has stared at a declined payment and thought this would just work if I lived somewhere else.

That frustration is real, and it is not your fault. But it is usually solvable, and the solutions have specific names and specific costs. That is what gets written here.

What I am, and what I am not

I am not a banker, an accountant or a licensed advisor, and I have not opened every account written about on this site. Saying otherwise would be easy and would also be a lie.

What I do instead is more boring and more checkable: I read the provider's own published fee page line by line, do the arithmetic on a real amount, and show you the source and the date. You do not have to trust me. You can open the same page and redo the same sum.

How I check these numbers

• Primary source only. Every fee comes from the provider's own fee or pricing page - not from another blog, not from a summary, not from memory. The link is in the post.
• I show the arithmetic. Not "about 8%" but which fee, charged at which step, on which amount. If my maths is wrong you can catch it.
• I mark what is first-hand and what is not. Where I have not moved my own money through something, the post says so plainly rather than implying experience I do not have.
• Everything carries a date. Fees and country availability change constantly. A number without a date is worthless. If a post is more than six months old, treat it as a starting point and open the provider's page yourself.
• When a provider contradicts itself, I say so. Fee pages for the same country often disagree between the consumer and merchant versions. I quote both rather than picking the friendlier number.

What I will not do

• Claim to have used a service I have not used, regardless of commission.
• Write a "top 10" where every option is a winner. If one tool wins, the list has one winner and nine explanations of who it is wrong for.
• Hide the affiliate relationship - see the affiliate disclosure.
• Give you financial, tax or legal advice. I am not qualified to, and your country's rules are not mine.

Corrections

If a fee changed, a country got added or dropped, or something here is simply wrong - tell me. Corrections get made the same week and dated in the post.