Payments are where most trading software quietly gets worse. A card is stored, a renewal fires on a date nobody remembers, a decline triggers a retry sequence, and the customer discovers the arrangement only when their bank flags it. CopySignals is built the other way round, and the design fits in a sentence: you pay, you get a month, nothing happens again until you pay.
Cards: Paddle as merchant of record
Card payments go through Paddle, acting as merchant of record. That phrase does real work. A merchant of record is the party that legally sells to you, which means Paddle is the name on the transaction, Paddle handles the consumption tax question in your country, and Paddle issues the invoice with the right VAT or sales tax treatment for where you actually are.
For a customer, the visible effects are three. The descriptor on your statement is Paddle rather than a company name you do not recognise, which is worth knowing before you dispute it. Your invoice is compliant in your own jurisdiction without anyone on our side maintaining tax registrations in dozens of countries. And your card details never reach us at all: they are entered on Paddle's own checkout and stay there.
The wider version of this decision, and why small software companies reach for it, is in payment orchestration. The short version is that a two-person product team cannot run global tax compliance and should not pretend otherwise.
Crypto: NOWPayments
Crypto payments go through NOWPayments. You are quoted an amount in a supported coin, you send it, and the month is granted when the payment confirms on chain. This is the rail that matters most to traders in countries where card acceptance for anything trading-adjacent is unreliable, a problem described in high-risk payment processing.
Two honest caveats. Confirmation is not instant: it depends on the chain and the network conditions at that moment, so a payment sent at the weekend can take a while to land. And a crypto payment is not reversible, which cuts both ways. There is no chargeback to protect you and no chargeback to threaten us, which is exactly why the rail exists on this side of the market. Choosing a network sensibly matters more than people think, and the difference is set out in TRC20 versus ERC20.
Send the exact quoted amount on the exact quoted network. An underpayment, or the right coin on the wrong chain, is the single most common way a crypto payment for software goes missing, and recovering it is manual work at best.
Why prepaid rather than a subscription
A stored card and an automatic renewal are convenient right up to the point where they are not. The failure modes are well documented across the industry: a card expires and a dunning sequence runs against a customer who left months ago, a renewal fires during a month the customer never used the product, a cancellation is processed one day after the charge. Read the pattern in recurring billing and it becomes clear how much of it exists to protect the vendor's revenue rather than the customer's position.
Prepaid months remove the whole category. There is nothing to cancel, because there is nothing scheduled. Stopping means not paying. The price of that is on you: nobody reminds your bank, so if you want continuity you have to pay before the month runs out, and if you forget, copying stops and signals arriving in that window are recorded as not placed.
What a payment actually grants
One month of the copier plus your connected accounts, at the published rate of $19.00 USD for the copier and first account and $9.00 USD for each additional one. Adding an account mid-month and removing it later is an account-count change, not a new billing relationship, and the arithmetic is covered in pricing in plain terms.
Refunds follow the terms published in the Legal Center rather than a promise in a blog post. Software that is activated immediately generally is not refundable once used, on either rail, and a crypto payment cannot be refunded to a card by any mechanism at all. If that matters to you, start on the card rail.
Declines, and what to do about one
Card declines on anything trading-adjacent are common and usually have nothing to do with your balance. Issuers apply their own rules to merchant categories, cross-border transactions and first-time payments, and the decline code that reaches the merchant is often generic. The reasons and what actually moves the needle are covered in the wider guides on card declines.
Practical order of operations: try the same card again once, since a proportion of declines are transient. Try a different card from a different issuer, which resolves most of the rest. If both fail, use the crypto rail. Contacting the issuer works but is slow, and the useful sentence to them is that the transaction is a software subscription billed by Paddle, not a transfer to a broker.
What we never see
Card numbers, expiry dates and security codes do not touch our systems on either rail. On the crypto side we see a payment reference and a confirmation, not your wallet's history. This is the same restraint applied everywhere else in the product, where contacts and outcomes are stored and message content is not. Current payment options are listed at copysignals.io.
Leveraged trading carries a high risk of loss. Paying for a copier buys tooling and nothing else.
"Nobody has ever thanked a software company for a renewal they forgot about. Prepaid months are less convenient for us and they end the entire argument."
— Alex Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Card payments run through Paddle as merchant of record, which puts the tax treatment and the invoice in the right jurisdiction and keeps card details off our systems.
- Crypto payments run through NOWPayments, confirm on chain rather than instantly, and cannot be reversed in either direction.
- Every payment grants one prepaid month, so there is no stored card, no renewal date and no dunning sequence.
- Forgetting to pay stops copying, and signals arriving in that window are recorded as not placed rather than silently lost.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will my card be charged automatically each month?
No. There is no automatic renewal on either rail. Each payment grants one prepaid month, and when it ends nothing is charged again unless you pay again.
Why does Paddle appear on my bank statement?
Paddle is the merchant of record for card payments, which means it is legally the seller and handles the tax treatment for your country. The descriptor reflects that.
How long does a crypto payment take to activate?
It activates when the payment confirms on the network you used, which depends on that chain and its conditions at the time. Send the exact quoted amount on the quoted network, since a wrong-chain transfer is difficult to recover.
About the Author
Alex Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He built eTrader, the terminal, the mobile apps, eTrader Broker, Copytrading, Business and Community, along with the worldwide clustered-server infrastructure it all runs on, with his brother Roman Onta helping on the design, and he leads that division today. Together with Roman he builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals, and the two of them carry worldwide compliance, payment processing and international business structuring side by side. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.