About BorderPaid

I run online stores and take affiliate income from Vietnam.

That one sentence is the whole reason this site exists. Every month I have to solve the same two problems that most finance blogs have never had to solve even once:

1. Money coming in. Stripe does not support Vietnam. Neither does Shopify Payments. PayPal charges me $4.99 plus roughly 3-4% to receive an international payment. So how does the money from a US customer actually reach my 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. So I kept my own notes. This site is those notes, cleaned up.

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.

How I test

• My own money, my own accounts. No vendor gives me a free account to review. If I have not moved real money through it, I do not write about it.
• I publish the fees I actually paid, not the fees on the pricing page. Those are rarely the same number.
• I write down what failed. The card that got declined, the transfer that took nine days, the account that got limited. That part is usually more useful than the feature list.
• Everything carries a date. Fees and country availability change constantly. If a post is more than six months old, treat the numbers as a starting point and check the provider.

What I will not do

• Recommend 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. I can only tell you what happened when I did it.

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.