Yep, Mama Accepts Credit Cards

CoinMama is an extremely convenient bitcoin brokerage allowing use of credit and debit cards to buy bitcoin. Their willingness to accept credit card payments – and assume chargeback risk, partially accounts for fees well higher than average.

So CoinMama is a convenient and simple exchange, with extremely fast account verification, and which allows users to pay for bitcoin with any Visa or Mastercard. Many potential users will be comfortable paying a fee premium for such a service.

Security

Coin Mama is not a wallet, and so when you acquire bitcoin they send it directly to your chosen bitcoin address. No funds are held on CoinMama either – and so there is no real wallet towards which CoinMama must provide security.

(Need a wallet? Check out our wallet reviews).

Opening an account

After registering your email address, you will need to verify your account. There are a three different verification levels

I sent my documents for level 1 verification at 10:53 on a Wednesday morning. I was approved by 11:25, so I was able to begin buying bitcoin in 30 minutes.

How to buy bitcoin with Coin Mana

CoinMama has developed an extremely intuitive and simple method of buying bitcoins. There are predetermined buy levels of 0.5, 1.0, 1.2 (Most popular!) and 2 bitcoins available. The price is generated when the webpage is opened, and the quoted price is valid until the time bar lapses, at which point a new price is generated. You will notice a sliding bar beneath the predetermined amount boxes, as well as bitcoin/fiat boxes, which allow you to slide/write your way to the amount of bitcoin you’d like.

Coinmama does not offer a bitcoin selling service, although they claim it is “coming soon”.

Fees

Coinmama is a brokerage, meaning they fill orders with their own stock of bitcoin. As far as brokerages go, Coinmama is on the expensive side of the pendulum, with fees of 6.75% included in the sales price quoted. The payment processor simplex tacks on an additional 5% as well, a lofty fee that is required as they mitigate against chargeback risk. And so bottom line, we are talking about a fee of 11.75%. For some this will be the cost of convenience, with no geographic or currency restriction, and the ability to buy bitcoin with credit or debit cards.

Might look elsewhere if:

You don’t need to buy using a credit card.  Check out our reviews of the best bitcoin exchanges for alternatives.  If you are looking strictly at credit card exchanges, we’d recommend a quick price check against either cubits before taking the plunge with Mama.

Bottom Line

How much are you willing to pay for convenience? Coinmama has been around for a long time with no issue, and it has become one of the more well-known bitcoin brokers in the market. Their fees are quite high, but they accept debit and credit cards, which is more or less unique in the market.