PST.net vs. Buvei vs. LinkPay: Virtual Cards Compared

Every few weeks someone asks us the same thing. "Which virtual card actually works for Google Ads?" They've usually tried two already. One got declined at the billing step. The other worked for three days, then the account went under review.

So let's compare the three names that come up most often in media buying chats: PST.NET, Buvei, and LinkPay. I'm Mike, I handle payments at YeezyPay, and I've watched advertisers cycle through all three. This isn't a sponsored roundup. Some of what follows is unflattering, and I'll say where our own position is biased.

One thing up front. A virtual card and an agency account solve different problems, and a lot of frustration comes from expecting the card to solve the second one. We'll get to that.

The card is the easy part. Keeping the account alive is the hard part.

Why media buyers reach for virtual cards at all

Google Ads bills you through a card, a bank account, or a few local methods. If you're sitting in a country where Google has suspended direct billing, or where your local issuer blocks cross-border ad spend, you need a card that Google will accept from an acceptable jurisdiction.

That's the whole premise. A provider issues you US or EU BINs, you top them up with USDT, and Google sees a card it recognises. No bank visit, no local entity, no waiting for a wire to clear.

The appeal is real. The limitation is also real, and it's one that card marketing pages never mention: the card doesn't change who Google thinks you are. Your IP, your billing country, your business details, your ad content — all of that still gets evaluated. A US BIN on an account that Google has already flagged doesn't buy you anything. It just moves where the money came from.

We've seen advertisers burn through four cards in a month chasing a payment problem that was never a payment problem. Their account was in a payments-suspended state and no card on earth was going to attach to it.

PST.NET: the widest selection, the loudest complaints

PST.NET is the biggest name in this category among affiliate and media buying crowds. It's been around the longest and the card catalogue reflects that.

The BIN pool is the strongest argument for it. Public reviews put PST at roughly 69 BINs with US geo and 20-plus card types across USD and EUR, on both Visa and Mastercard. There are separate card lines aimed at Facebook Ads, Google Ads, TikTok Ads, plus a universal advertising card and an Ultima tier for mixed personal and ad spend. Card issuance is unlimited — no cap on how many you open, no cap on spend.

Pricing is where it gets expensive. The standard payment card runs about $7 to issue, with the same amount as a monthly maintenance fee after the first month. The advertising card is $10 on both counts. Top-up commission is tiered by card type, and the published spread is 2.9% to 6% — Facebook cards at 2.9%, TikTok at 4%, and Google and universal advertising cards at the top of the range, 6%.

Read that again. Six percent on the Google card. On a $20,000 month, that's $1,200 before you've shown a single impression.

Now the uncomfortable part. PST.NET's company rating on Trustpilot is not displayed — the page carries a notice that the rating is unavailable due to a breach of Trustpilot's guidelines. That's a review-platform integrity issue, not a verdict on the product, but it's a flag worth naming because the usual signal you'd use to assess a provider has been removed.

The review content that remains skews hard toward one theme: frozen balances. Users describe funds held for weeks under "compliance" after they tried to close accounts and withdraw. Others report accounts deleted outright with balances inside and no withdrawal path offered. There are complaints about unexplained internal transfer charges and about cards issued for a fee that then didn't function, with refunds refused.

I want to be careful here. Review sites concentrate unhappy people by design, and a provider processing this volume will accumulate horror stories no matter how well it runs. We haven't audited PST's books and we can't tell you what share of accounts this touches. What we can say is that the complaint pattern is specific and repeated, and it's about custody of your money rather than card decline rates. That's a different class of risk from "sometimes the BIN doesn't work."

Our honest read: PST is the right tool if you need BIN variety and you treat the balance as a working float, not a treasury. Don't park $50,000 there. Top up what you'll spend this week.

Buvei: cheaper headline, murkier fine print

Buvei is the newer entrant and positions itself as the transparent, no-subscription option. Buvei LLC lists a Santa Monica address, registration as a FinCEN MSB in the US, and a TCSP licence in Hong Kong. That's more regulatory surface than most providers in this space put on their homepage, and it counts for something.

The product claims 15-plus BINs across Visa and Mastercard, support for 35-plus currencies, coverage of 220-plus countries and regions, and a 98% approval rate. Single-use disposable cards with per-card spend limits are supported. Physical cards are listed as coming soon. Funding is crypto-first: USDT on TRC20 and ERC20, USDC, DAI, and ETH.

Here's my problem with Buvei, and it's a research problem as much as a product one. The fee numbers don't reconcile across sources.

Secondary coverage reports no monthly fee, a 2.5% top-up fee on stablecoin deposits, $0.25 per transaction, and $10 per card issued with no card maintenance charge. Other coverage of the same product reports a 1% currency conversion fee plus a flat $2 per deposit, and a $250 monthly minimum. Elsewhere the per-card cost is given as a $4 to $10 range. Buvei's own homepage publishes no pricing page at all, and its blog describes fees as varying by currency and BIN type without putting numbers to it.

Some of this is probably plan tiers and some is probably stale third-party content. But a provider that won't publish a rate card is a provider you have to price by experiment. Fund $200, issue one card, run a small Google Ads charge, and read your statement. Don't scale on numbers you found in a comparison post. Including this one.

Credit where due: Buvei issues without heavy KYC and the issuance is genuinely instant, which is the single most common thing buyers want from this category. Minimum top-ups start around $5 on the self-serve side.

LinkPay: subscription tiers and the cashback angle

LinkPay — the live site is linkpay.io — runs a different model. Instead of charging per card, it charges per month and gives you cards as part of the plan.

Four tiers. Free carries no monthly fee but takes a 1% deposit fee and a 2% transaction fee. Plus is $59 a month, drops the transaction fee to 1.5%, and bundles five cards. Pro is $179, bundles 15 cards and adds 1% cashback. Ultra is $299, bundles 100 cards, pays 3% cashback, and zeroes the transaction fee.

The cashback is the hook, and the maths is worth doing properly rather than taking the headline. At Ultra, 3% back with no transaction fee means heavy spend genuinely works in your favour. At $100,000 a month across cards, 3% is $3,000 against a $299 subscription. That's not a gimmick, that's a real rebate.

At low spend it inverts. If you're running $3,000 a month, Ultra's $299 costs you 10% of spend to save 3%. The Free tier's 2% transaction fee would have cost you $60. There's a crossover point and most buyers sit on the wrong side of it while paying for the tier above.

LinkPay advertises zero fees on deposits, withdrawals, and declined transactions on the paid tiers, with funding in seven-plus cryptocurrencies. Declined-transaction fees are a quiet drain at other providers — Google retrying a failed charge four times can cost you real money — so a provider that charges nothing for declines is making a meaningful promise, assuming it holds.

My reservation about LinkPay is the opposite of my reservation about PST. There's much less public complaint history, which is partly a good sign and partly a function of smaller scale. Less data means less certainty, not more safety.

Side by side

	PST.NET	Buvei	LinkPay
Model	Pay per card	Pay per card	Monthly subscription tiers
Card issuance	~$7 payment card / ~$10 ad card	Reported $4–$10 (unpublished)	Bundled: 5 / 15 / 100 by tier
Monthly maintenance	Same as issuance, after month 1	None reported	$0 / $59 / $179 / $299
Top-up / deposit fee	2.9%–6% by card type (Google 6%)	Reported 1%–2.5% + possible flat fee	1% on Free, 0% on paid tiers
Transaction fee	Included in top-up commission	Reported ~$0.25	2% / 1.5% / 0% by tier
Cashback	No	No	1% (Pro) / 3% (Ultra)
BIN depth	~69 US BINs, 20+ card types	15+ BINs	Multiple, not itemised publicly
Funding	Crypto, wire	USDT TRC20/ERC20, USDC, DAI, ETH	7+ cryptocurrencies
KYC	Required for full access	Light / instant issuance	Light
Main risk	Documented frozen-balance complaints	Pricing not published	Tier cost at low spend

Treat every number in that table as a starting point for your own test, not a quote. Rates in this industry change without announcement and third-party reviews go stale fast.

Tired of testing cards to find one Google accepts?
We skip the card problem entirely. YeezyPay gives advertisers in restricted countries access to Google Ads through established agency accounts — you top up in USDT, we handle billing on our side, and there's no BIN to get declined. See how it works at yeezypay.io.

What actually gets accounts banned, and why the card usually isn't it

This is the section I'd read first if I were you.

Google's payment verification looks at more than whether a charge authorises. Billing country against account country. Card issuing country against both. Whether the card has 3DS and whether it can complete the challenge. How many Google accounts have previously used the same BIN. Whether the name on the card matches the account's business details.

Shared BINs are the quiet killer. When a provider issues from a small pool and that pool gets used by hundreds of buyers, some of whom are running aggressive verticals, the BIN itself picks up a reputation. Your card gets declined and nobody tells you why. This is exactly why PST's 69-BIN depth has value and why a 15-BIN pool is a meaningfully thinner hand.

Here's a case from our side. An advertiser came to us in the spring after losing three accounts in six weeks. He was convinced his cards were the problem and had switched provider twice. We pulled his setup apart. The cards were fine — they authorised every time. What killed him was that all three accounts were created from the same device fingerprint, with the same business name, and the second and third were created immediately after the first was suspended. Google's systems linked them in under a fortnight.

No card would have saved that. He didn't have a payments problem, he had a circumvention problem, and the card spend he'd lost to testing was pure waste.

The honest rule: if your card authorises and your account still dies, stop buying cards.

Cards versus agency accounts

We're an agency account provider, so discount this accordingly. But the comparison is worth laying out plainly because people conflate the two.

A virtual card gives you a payment instrument. You keep full ownership of your ad account, you keep direct control, and you keep all the risk. If the account gets suspended, that's yours to appeal and yours to lose.

An agency account gives you access to an account that already has standing with Google, usually with a managed billing relationship behind it. You lose some direct control and you pay a commission on spend. In exchange you get an account that's less likely to be flagged on payment grounds, and someone to call when something breaks.

Cost comparison, roughly. A card provider charging 6% on top-ups for a Google card isn't far off what many agency accounts charge in commission. If you're already paying 6% for a card and still managing suspension risk yourself, you're paying agency-account money for card-level support.

Where cards win: small spend, many separate accounts, testing phase, verticals an agency won't touch, and any situation where you need the ad account to be unambiguously yours.

Where agency accounts win: sustained spend, a compliant offer, a restricted country of residence, and a preference for not rebuilding your account every quarter.

How to test any of these without losing money

Same process regardless of which you pick.

• Fund the minimum. Not a month's budget — enough for one card and one small charge.
• Issue one card and run a real Google Ads top-up of $20 to $50. Watch whether it clears first attempt or needs a retry.
• Download the statement and reconcile every line against the advertised rate. This is where unlisted fees show up.
• Try a withdrawal of a small amount before you scale. How a provider behaves when you take money out tells you more than how it behaves when you put money in.
• Only then increase the float — and keep the float sized to spend, not to comfort.

That withdrawal test is the one people skip, and it's the one that would have given early warning in most of the complaint stories above.

So which one

If BIN variety is your constraint and you can discipline yourself to keep a small balance, PST.NET has the deepest catalogue in the category. Go in knowing the Google card top-up sits at the expensive end and that the custody complaints are documented.

If you want low friction and fast issuance and you're spending modestly, Buvei is worth a $200 test. Price it yourself, because they won't price it for you.

If you're spending heavily and consistently, LinkPay's Ultra tier is the only option here where the fee structure can turn positive at volume. Run the crossover maths against your actual monthly spend before you subscribe.

And if you've already cycled through two providers and your accounts keep dying anyway, the card isn't your problem. We'd rather tell you that than sell you a third one.

Sources

• PST.NET — advertising cards
• Trustpilot — PST.NET reviews and rating notice
• AffCatalog — PST.NET rates and BIN count
• Buvei — product and company details
• Buvei — crypto funding options
• LinkPay — plans and cashback
• LinkPay — cards for advertising platforms
• AffCatalog — LinkPay tier pricing
• Finup — virtual card providers for media buying, 2026

Reviewed by Mike, YeezyPay. Pricing checked November 2026. Rates in this category change frequently — verify with the provider before committing funds.