I absolutely agree. I have designed the platform to use wallets, so I never involve a third party in my business or the business of the content creators and risk being financially deplatformed(famously often done by Stripe and Paypal). I wanted to give users a chance to use payment cards to deposit money into their wallets, as people are used to paying online with cards, but as the platform provides no service in return, this was incompatible with policies of payment processors and card providers. So users have to make a bank transfer. Thankfully European SEPA payments are nowadays wide-spread and can be instant. People have banking apps on their phones, so it is even faster than using a card. But the use of cards for online payments is seeded too deep for modern users to find this comfortable, yet. Anyhow, I think we are slowly moving away from cards and in time they will hopefully become a thing of the past as internet has been around for ages and cards fulfil absolutely no useful function that cannot be supplement by decentralised solution by modern banks.

I agree that they are a cartel tax on the economy, but their costs are higher than that. They are also taking on risk from credit. If your card gets stolen, the thief buys a $3k surfboard, and then you get refunded, they are out the $3k.

They are also paying for the rewards on top of the points given out.

Again, not saying they’re not making a ton of profit. It’s higher than you’ve said, though.

Chances are it could be similarly expensive because cobol devs are more expensive now? Is very old but still scalable infrastructure really much cheaper to run now?