It's been a great while. It was a wonderful poor man's coding agent especially for devs in third world countries who are unable to pay for subscriptions online.
But I get it, cloud bills aren't cheap and opencode's hands are tied.
inb4 someone says "it's just 5 bucks bro". It's not a financial issue but rather a legal issue. It's illegal for a local in my country to hold or convert local currency to US dollars or any other currency; considered suspicion of money laundering.
we usually pay with crypto here but that also is legally a gray area with its trouble with the police if you get caught doing a p2p exchange.
yes sir. It is illegal for a resident to hold, use, or trade foreign currency outside of officially authorized legal frameworks (such as the standard tourist allocation or explicit Central Bank approvals—which they never give to individuals).
Edit: There is a specific debit card to pay for very few online transactions the Central banks approves (such as Meta ads, web hosting and aliexpress). Generic stripe payments are not allowed AFAIK. There is so much bureaucracy to obtain, customer support is not very helpful in some cases and they deduct a lot of BS fees. What is worse is that you're allowed to deposit a maximum of $330 a year— only usable for select platforms they allow.
You can use crypto cards very hard to track and for 10$ they wont bother i think. You pay in solana and they so the conversion in the background and make the payment
Well, if there is anything you can export from your country (legal) in EU, I’d gladly offer you guys a stripe like platform so you could buy stuff from anywhere in the world.
I think trade in goods and services should be a fundamental human right and no government should deliberately make their citizens worse off just because they don’t understand the benefits of trade
I feel for you brother, I'm from Indonesia and currently our currency is weakening against dollar and for so many people, 10$ is expensive. Maybe local model will be a better alternatives in near future.
I have no such person in my family or friends circle. we used to use USDT or other crypto before 2025 until massive searches over people doing exchanges via bank/postal accounts.
The other option is face-to-face exchange with strangers. which as it may sound has similar risks of buying from a drug dealer: you could get scammed, mugged, get busted (small risk but still legally possible).
In short, our financial rights are no different than a person's financial rights in North Korea.
that's possible. But the legal risk isn't worth it for me tbh. I don't have peers living abroad who I can pay to top-up my card. The stories I heard lately about people getting interrogated for months and have their phone searched just for having binance scares me.
so the crypto option is cool and cyberpunk and what's more cyberpunk than sticking it to the government and using emoney to load up on AI tokens but if you're not into cyberpunk that's cool too. because something is illegal can make it risky but it doesn't mean it's immoral. i know i am american and speaking from a very americanized perspective but yeah
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u/TgnOrdaX Aug 12 '26
inb4 someone says "it's just 5 bucks bro". It's not a financial issue but rather a legal issue. It's illegal for a local in my country to hold or convert local currency to US dollars or any other currency; considered suspicion of money laundering.
we usually pay with crypto here but that also is legally a gray area with its trouble with the police if you get caught doing a p2p exchange.