Whether they’re intentionally limiting payment methods based on regions or not, impossible for me to say, but sometimes this is intentional. See this thread about a “Jake Smith” (likely fake name) who was testing credit cards on small websites en masse.
Summary is:
- bad guy finds a list of credit cards from a data beach
- bad guy wants to see which cards are still active and which are not
- bad guy runs scripts on hundreds of websites to test the cards, and then marks which ones work and which do not
- cards that work will then be used to make larger purchases (like gift cards) for $100s
- innocent customers who have their card stolen will report a chargeback on both charges, which impacts those small companies
In this case, Stripe proactively refunded every single payment and waived all fees for the businesses who were targeted, including chargeback fees if initiated by the cardholders. So small businesses were not impacted. But all of this is to show just how dangerous even a single crack in the system can be.
It’s certainly annoying for the customer if they cannot use all payment methods (or any…), but I understand why they do it, and why they keep this stuff a “black box” to prevent people from circumventing. Even on the Minnit level, we block some users, orgs, and/or chats (automatically & manually) from making payments at all. Pretty counter-intuitive for a for-profit company like Minnit to prevent some people from buying our service, eh? But this is the reality of the modern-day internet.
Does that mean it’s going to be added?
My mind is pretty active, so sometimes ideas being “kept in mind” is more of a curse than a blessing for their likelihood.
One blocking variable here is the fact that we offer a better deal on coins if you buy more. Buying 500 coins is $5USD (100 per $1) but 6500 is $50 (130 per $1). The shop is set up to accommodate this; sometimes people buying a 250 coin item are spending $2.50 or sometimes they’re spending less. That is fine for me.
Chat subscriptions, however, have actual costs behind them, for extended upload storage, user limits, and features like emoji/animated assets (backgrounds/bot avatar/etc), CSS (which can be long), longer message lengths, and more.
If you buy bulk coins at a rate of $5 for 500, then 500 coins = 1 boost is $5, which is what boosters pay today. However, buying $50 for 6500 coins makes a 500 coin boost only cost you $3.85. This is almost 25% off. 4 boosts goes from $20USD to $15.40. At scale it’ll be cheaper for organizations to buy coins in bulk, then periodically boost. Worse for us, more annoying for them.
So if we add this in, 1 boost may be closer to 800 coins. Which isn’t exactly fair or attractive, unless folks just have 800 coins to burn. But is that so common? They could also gift them…
I won’t say the idea will never happen, but these are the things that make even simple ideas harder in practice to actually implement. 
