Yellow Card alternatives for developers

Yellow Card (yellowcard.io), the stablecoin payments company, closed its retail app on 1 January 2026 and now sells only to businesses, with API pricing quoted per account rather than published. If you want a naira on-ramp whose price you can read before you build, the self-serve options are Paystack, Daya API, Fincra, Flutterwave and Bitnob.

Daya API publishes 1% capped at ₦100 to collect naira into a virtual account, against 1% capped at ₦300 for a Paystack dedicated virtual account and 2% plus 7.5% VAT on a Flutterwave local collection. On a ₦1,000,000 collection that is ₦100, ₦300 and ₦21,500.

Every figure below came off the provider's own documentation, help centre or pricing page on 6 October 2026. If what you're deciding is how to build the ramp rather than who to buy it from, the guide to stablecoin on- and off-ramps for developers in Africa covers the design questions first.

What happened to the Yellow Card app?

Yellow Card discontinued its retail app on 1 January 2026 and moved entirely to selling infrastructure to other businesses. Yellow Card's own announcement gives 31 December 2025 as the last day retail customers could withdraw, says their funds stayed "safe, secure and accessible for withdrawal throughout this transition period", and describes the move as "a strategic decision to discontinue our retail app and focus exclusively on our B2B Institutional Suite".

That lands on a developer in two different ways, and they pull in opposite directions.

• If you were building on Yellow Card for consumers, or your users were cashing out through the Yellow Card app, that route closed in January 2026 and isn't coming back.
• If you're a business buying infrastructure, Yellow Card got bigger rather than smaller. Its announcement says it operates in 34 countries, and TechCabal's report on the closure says the company serves more than 30,000 businesses and processed over $3 billion in 2024.

What does Yellow Card do for developers now?

Yellow Card sells an API suite covering three jobs: collections, which take local currency in from your customers by bank transfer or mobile money; disbursements, which pay local currency out to end users; and virtual accounts for deposits and withdrawals. Its getting-started documentation says a first integration takes under 30 minutes, and that a full sandbox mirrors production.

Two things about the pricing are worth knowing before you plan around it.

1. Yellow Card's fees page carries no figure at all. Every pricing question on it routes to a "Speak to an expert" button.
2. Its B2B payment API FAQ says there's no sign-up fee and "a very low transactional fee for completed payments", debited automatically once a transaction completes. To find out what a transaction actually cost, its dashboard guide tells you to open the Fees section and search the transaction ID.

So the price exists, and you read it after the payment rather than before it. For a team with volume to negotiate on, that's a normal enterprise arrangement and often a cheaper one. For a team costing out unit economics in a spreadsheet this week, it's a gap where a number should be.

Which Yellow Card alternatives can a developer use for naira?

Five providers will collect naira for you and publish what it costs: Paystack, Daya API, Fincra, Flutterwave and Bitnob. Only two of them, Daya API and Bitnob, will also turn that naira into stablecoins inside the same integration, so the other three leave the conversion, the custody and the reconciliation to you.

The figures come from Paystack's pricing page, Flutterwave's Nigeria pricing page, Fincra's pricing page, Bitnob's transaction fees article and Daya's API documentation.

What do naira on-ramp APIs charge, once you do the arithmetic?

Two of the three self-serve naira collection fees are capped and the third isn't, and that's what decides the cost of anything above ₦10,000. Collecting ₦1,000,000 by bank transfer costs ₦100 through Daya API, ₦300 through a Paystack dedicated virtual account and ₦21,500 through Flutterwave, because the first two stop growing and the third keeps going.

What it means for you: if your users fund in small amounts, a ₦2,000 wallet top-up or a micro-payment, all three land within a few naira of each other and the cap never comes into play. If they fund in five and six figures, the cap is the only column that matters, and the gap gets large fast.

Payouts go the other way, and it's worth saying plainly. Sending naira out to a Nigerian bank account costs ₦50 at Paystack and ₦50 at Flutterwave on anything above ₦50,000, where Daya API charges 1% capped at ₦100. On a ₦500,000 payout that's ₦50 against ₦100. So if payouts are the bulk of your volume and you don't need stablecoins at all, a naira-only processor is cheaper and you should use one.

What Daya API gives you for that difference is the second half of the job in the same integration: the naira converts to USDC or USDT at a rate you quoted first, and settles on-chain, into an internal balance, or straight back out as naira.

Where does Daya API fit?

Daya API is the single-country option: it does naira collection, naira payout and stablecoin conversion for Nigeria, and its documentation publishes the numbers for all three. The collection fee is 1% capped at ₦100 on a naira virtual account deposit. The payout fee is a flat ₦20 when the recipient gets less than ₦1,000, and 1% capped at ₦100 at or above it, with a ₦100 minimum to a bank recipient.

What else is in the documentation, rather than in a sales call:

• Rates are firm quotes with a side attached. A new rate is generated about every 10 minutes and expires about 30 minutes after it's created, so the rate you showed your user is the rate that settles. A deposit that arrives after expiry gets flagged rather than converted at whatever the market has moved to.
• Settlement goes three ways. On-chain sends the converted stablecoins to a blockchain address, internal balance credits your own Daya balance, and NGN payout sends naira to a Nigerian bank account.
• Ten chains in production, with USDC and USDT across Polygon, Ethereum, Base, Optimism, BNB Smart Chain, Solana, Sui, Tempo, Tron and Aptos. Support is listed per chain and per direction, which matters, because several chains take a deposit without allowing a withdrawal.
• The limits are published: roughly $1 equivalent as a minimum deposit, $10,000 equivalent as a per-transaction maximum on both deposits and payouts, and $1,000,000 equivalent on a rolling 24-hour merchant basis.
• US dollar virtual accounts are part of the same API, over ACH and wire, once a customer has completed tier 2 verification. You can set your own fee percentage on them, from 0 to 50.
• The sandbox runs on Ethereum, with USDC deposits and withdrawals and USDT deposits.

The $10,000 per-transaction ceiling is the first thing to check against your own use case. If one customer payment routinely runs above it, that's a conversation rather than a self-serve integration, and it's the clearest case for buying from a provider built for enterprise size.

When is Yellow Card still the better choice?

Yellow Card is the better choice when you need more than one country. Its announcement says it covers 34 countries across Africa, Latin America and Asia, and one integration across that footprint is something no Nigeria-only provider can offer. A multi-market payout product is Yellow Card's job, not Daya API's.

That's clearly true in three situations:

1. You're paying out in several African currencies, not only naira.
2. Your volume is large and regular enough that a negotiated rate beats a published one.
3. You want one counterparty's compliance and treasury setup across every market you operate in, rather than one per country.

Where it's less clearly true is at the start. A team integrating its first naira ramp, with no volume to negotiate on and a sandbox to get through this week, is the team that gains most from a price it can read in the documentation, which is where Daya API's published 1% capped at ₦100 does the work.

What should you check before you switch provider?

Check six things, in this order. The first three decide whether a provider can do the job at all, and the last three decide what it costs you to run once it's live.

1. Both halves of the job. Collecting naira and converting it into stablecoins are two separate pieces of work. A provider that only does the first leaves you building conversion, custody and reconciliation yourself, and that's usually the longest part of the project.
2. Settlement destinations. Ask where converted money can actually end up: a blockchain address you control, a balance the provider holds, or straight out as local currency. The answer decides how much of your own ledger you have to write.
3. Chains and assets, per direction. Support isn't symmetrical, and a chain that accepts a deposit may not allow a withdrawal. That's the kind of detail that only hurts after launch.
4. The published price, and where the cap sits. A percentage with no cap and a percentage with a cap are different products above the cap.
5. Limits, per transaction and per day. A ceiling you'll hit in month three is a migration you'll do in month three.
6. The sandbox, and whether it reproduces failure as well as success. Test the webhook replay and the amount-mismatch path, not just the happy one.

The comparison of naira on-ramp and off-ramp APIs runs the same providers through the two-jobs test in more detail, and the walkthrough on building a crypto on-ramp in Nigeria covers the integration itself.