Bitcoin on your Xero invoices, paid through a server you install, host and back up yourself
First month free • No credit card required • Cancel anytime
Xero reported about 4.9 million customers at 31 March 2026, with most of its base in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Its invoice payment options come from connected services such as Stripe for cards and GoCardless for direct debit, and every one of them settles into a bank account. A client who wants to pay in Bitcoin has no route inside that arrangement. Most workarounds replace it with another company's account, another set of terms and, often, another identity check.
LNbits takes a different route. It is free software, released under the MIT licence, that you install on a machine you choose. It sits in front of a Lightning funding source and gives you wallets, API keys and payment pages on your own domain. Where the server runs, who can log in, how it is backed up and which Lightning backend funds it are all your decisions. For a business that already treats its own infrastructure as part of its risk policy, that is the point.
PayInBTC.me connects the two. Xero is linked through its standard OAuth authorisation with read access only, and your LNbits instance is linked with an invoice/read key and a wallet ID. Your invoices carry a Bitcoin option next to the payment services you already use, the amount is calculated at the live rate when the client opens it, and the payment lands in a wallet on your own server. Nothing about how you invoice in Xero changes.
LNbits payment pages come from its SatsPay Server extension, which creates a charge with an amount, an expiry time and a choice of Lightning, on-chain or both. When a Xero client clicks the Bitcoin link, PayInBTC.me reads the invoice total from Xero and sends the client to a payment page that your LNbits instance serves. The charge, its status and the wallet balance sit in your own database, not in a processor's dashboard. It also means the instance must be reachable over HTTPS from the internet, because the client's browser lands on it directly.
LNbits is light. A third-party comparison puts the requirement at one virtual CPU, one to two gigabytes of memory and about one gigabyte of storage, with no blockchain data to sync, which a small VPS at around five US dollars a month can cover. If you would rather not rent a server, LNbitsBox, announced in April 2026, is a dedicated device with LNbits preinstalled, set up in a browser, with backups and remote access handled from an admin panel. A New Zealand studio can keep the machine in Auckland, and a UK practice can pick a data centre in the UK or the EU. A firm with a written policy on where payment records are stored can point to the exact machine that holds them.
LNbits does not move money by itself. It keeps accounts of wallets on top of a funding source, which can be LND, Core Lightning, Eclair, Phoenixd, Spark and others. Running your own node gives the most control and also means managing channels and liquidity, while Phoenixd or Spark take most of that work away and come with their own terms to read first. Custody follows the backend: on your own instance with your own funding source it is self-custodial, and pointing LNbits at a hosted service hands custody to that service. Because PayInBTC.me talks only to LNbits, you can change the backend later without touching the Xero connection.
PayInBTC.me reads the invoice number, amount and currency from Xero and cannot write to your ledger, edit an invoice or touch your chart of accounts. On the LNbits side it uses the invoice/read key and the wallet ID rather than the admin key, so the credential it holds is not one that can spend from the wallet. The Bitcoin settles to a wallet on your instance, and PayInBTC.me never holds it.
Setup takes about five minutes on the PayInBTC.me side. The one prerequisite is a running LNbits instance, and that part stays in your hands.
Take a £3,000 invoice from a UK design studio to a client abroad. Here is roughly how the payment cost compares, including the cost of running your own server.
| Method | Cost on a £3,000 invoice | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| International card payment | About £95 to £105 | Around 3.25% plus a fixed fee for non-UK cards on common UK processing rates, before any FX markup |
| International bank transfer | £10 to £30 | Wire fees on one or both sides, two to three working days, and a manual match in Xero |
| Bitcoin via PayInBTC.me and LNbits | About £1.20 | Flat 1,500 sats per invoice on pay-per-use, plus a Lightning routing fee of a few sats; your funding backend may add its own fees |
| Server to host LNbits | Roughly £4 to £5 a month | A small VPS at around five US dollars a month. The cost is fixed whatever the invoice volume, and nil if you already run a suitable server |
On this invoice the gap between a card payment and a Bitcoin payment is roughly £95. A server at £4 to £5 a month plus the PayInBTC.me subscription stays below the card cost of that one invoice. If you expect only a handful of Bitcoin invoices a year, the server becomes the largest line, which is why this setup suits businesses that already run their own infrastructure.
You need a Xero account and a running LNbits instance that PayInBTC.me can reach. How you host that instance is up to you.
The first month is free, with three free invoices on the pay-per-use plan, so you can run real invoices through the setup first. Setup instructions for both sides are at docs.payinbtc.me.
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