Today I've done a small test to compare the top up prices of two of the available Dash prepaid cards. I would have included more, but I only own a Shake, which accepts Dash directly, and a Bitwala, which accepts it via Shapeshift.
Usually cards are not transparent about their fees, so I topped up the same amount in EUR in both of them at the same time. Then compared the amounts of Dash requested to get the exchange price. In the case of Shake I had to do further adjustment after the top up because when you introduce an EUR amount they give you an amount of Dash to send to get "aproximately" that amount of EUR.
The results were:
Shake: 142.908547056 EUR per DASH
Bitwala: 146.645819301 EUR per DASH
So Bitwala game me 2.6% more for my Dash than Shake, which I think is quite significant. At the time of the comparison the price of Dash in Kraken's DASH/EUR market (the biggest one in EUR) was 148. So 3.4% fee for Shake and 0,9% for Bitwala.
As for speed, both payments were InstantSend. Bitwala credited me in seconds (I wasn't timing, but less than 10). Shake took a bit longer, but it was just a couple minutes.
This comparison obviously favors Bitwala, but I will still keep using both. Shake was the first Dash prepaid card, it has always worked great for me and I'm a loyal guy. I just publish this so the info is available. When the market knows, actors react and I hope that with more price info the different providers will lower their prices. Also, this is just one data point. For a proper comparison I would encourage everyone to publish their data so the information is more complete.
Usually cards are not transparent about their fees, so I topped up the same amount in EUR in both of them at the same time. Then compared the amounts of Dash requested to get the exchange price. In the case of Shake I had to do further adjustment after the top up because when you introduce an EUR amount they give you an amount of Dash to send to get "aproximately" that amount of EUR.
The results were:
Shake: 142.908547056 EUR per DASH
Bitwala: 146.645819301 EUR per DASH
So Bitwala game me 2.6% more for my Dash than Shake, which I think is quite significant. At the time of the comparison the price of Dash in Kraken's DASH/EUR market (the biggest one in EUR) was 148. So 3.4% fee for Shake and 0,9% for Bitwala.
As for speed, both payments were InstantSend. Bitwala credited me in seconds (I wasn't timing, but less than 10). Shake took a bit longer, but it was just a couple minutes.
This comparison obviously favors Bitwala, but I will still keep using both. Shake was the first Dash prepaid card, it has always worked great for me and I'm a loyal guy. I just publish this so the info is available. When the market knows, actors react and I hope that with more price info the different providers will lower their prices. Also, this is just one data point. For a proper comparison I would encourage everyone to publish their data so the information is more complete.
