Paypal alternatives for freelancers

Joost

Recently Paypal decided to freeze my account because I was under 18 when I created it. I actively used that account for ~8+ years -and paid my fair share in fees.-  Now there's no way for me to even appeal this. Luckily my account was empty at the time but I was expecting a sizable payment and wouldn't have been able to access those funds. 
Regardless of the risk of having your account shut down, the fees (for cross-border/currency payments) on Paypal are too damn high and there's a hidden fee if you need to convert to a different currency.

https://hackernoon.com/paypal-is-still-one-of-the-worst-online-examples-of-customer-service-42f3c13f6cd0

Alternatives: 
https://transferwise.com/
https://www.revolut.com/
Bitcoin

The fee for international payments with Paypal is 0.5% up to 5.2% + a flat currency conversion fee of 2.5% 
Transferwise has a 0.99% fee for USD to EUR and goes straight into your bank account.
Revolut is effectively just a prepaid Mastercard credit card. But there's no fee for currency conversions.

Joao Sapiro

isnt it less expensive to simply get a wire transfer ? i am genuinely curious as those have usually ( at least on my bank ) a fixed rate.

Eric Chadwick

I put some alternatives here, when I was researching this last year. http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Freelance

I had a client in the UK, and I'm in the US. We used a direct wire transfer from their bank to mine. Their bank charged a fee something like 10 GBP but mine charged nothing, and also converted from GBP to USD at market rate.

We also used PayPal but for smaller one-offs, and I made sure they understood they were responsible for paying all fees. As long as I got my full payment, all was good!

Sorry to hear about the frozen account. I've heard similar stories from other game developers.