The $10 Problem: Let India’s Creators Get Paid
How the RBI Is Blocking Small Inward Remittances to Creators, Influencers and Micro-Exporters
Stop Making $10 Feel Illegal
By Karan Bir Singh Sidhu
Stripe: The Ubiquitous Gateway
Stripe is the default checkout of the internet. It’s used by everyone from solo creators to half the Fortune 100, processes trillions annually, and lets customers pay from virtually anywhere in the world, across 135+ currencies. For a reader in London or Austin, Stripe feels familiar, fast, and safe—the gold standard for a one-minute, no-drama payment experience. Even when platform fees climb into the low teens, the upside is clear: the receiver never has to share bank particulars with an overseas payer, and the money lands cleanly in a KYC’d Indian bank account.
Crucially, Stripe’s reach is planetary: businesses in dozens of countries can open Stripe accounts, while cardholders in nearly every country can pay. That ubiquity is exactly why India’s small exporters, creators, and SaaS tinkerers lean on it. And yet—qua India—the experience is persistently brittle. The same card that clears elsewhere can stumble at an Indian checkout, especially for small, cross-border payments. We should fix that.
The $10 Jam
A curious thing happens when readers abroad try to pay Indian creators. The same cards that breeze through big platforms stumble when used to support an independent writer, designer, or coder in Chandigarh. I see it with my own newsletter, “The KBS Chronicle”: someone in London, Toronto, or Austin wants to send a modest $10, and the payment fails. It isn’t a bad card. It’s a bad system.
We are fond of speeches about the digital economy and India’s global talent. Yet at the precise moment a willing customer meets a willing Indian creator, our rails contrive to say no. The message, intended or not, is that a clean, taxable $10 is somehow suspect.
Small Sums, Big Stakes
Ten dollars looks small on a spreadsheet; at street level it’s meaningful. For a student selling a £9 plug-in, a yoga coach teaching diaspora families, an illustrator delivering a book cover, or a policy writer monetising a niche audience, $10 at scale is groceries, rent, and data. It is the difference between persistence and abandonment.
For the State, those tiny inflows are foreign exchange credited to Indian accounts and reported as income. Micro-exports diversify our export base, spread earnings beyond metros, and keep young people in formal, visible work. Why treat the most benign money as the hardest to move?
Friction We Built
The pain looks banal because it arrives as form fields and pop-ups. A checkout demands a full foreign billing address. A plug-in fails to collect an India-specific export field. A cryptic decline code shrugs, “Try elsewhere.” The buyer gives up; the seller apologises; everyone loses.
Beneath this tedium sit three man-made chokepoints. First, licences and providers have been in flux, leaving small merchants unclear who can process which cross-border payments this month. Second, authentication has tightened globally—and rightly so—but our implementation often stacks prompts and fails to distinguish tiny, low-risk transactions from large, risky ones. Third, data capture at checkout is inconsistent: what should be a simple, standard bundle becomes a scavenger hunt.
Right-Sizing, Not Deregulating
This is not an argument for loosening standards; it is an argument for proportionality. We can deter fraud, enforce KYC, and preserve audit trails without making a $10 tip feel like a wire transfer to a numbered account.
Right-sizing is a design choice. It means asking only for what is necessary at low values, using one clean verification step, and keeping merchant obligations unambiguous. When rules are clear and calibrated, compliance becomes the default behaviour—not a test of stamina.
A De-Minimis Green Channel
Start with a micro-export lane for services and digital goods. Set a sensible cap—say, up to $1,000 per transaction with a pragmatic monthly ceiling—covering the universe of freelancers and creators. Within this lane, require a light data bundle: payer name, email, and country; a plain description of the service; and shipping details only when physical goods are involved.
The point is not to hide anything; it is to standardise. If every platform implements the same minimal schema, the checkout just works. Banks still see the flow. Export reporting remains intact. The customer completes the payment in seconds, not in a fog of bureaucratic theatre.
One Clean Check, Not Three
If strong customer authentication is required, make it one familiar step—done properly—rather than a matryoshka doll of prompts. A good 3-D Secure experience, coupled with risk-based exemptions for very low values, protects consumers without punishing trust.
The principle is simple: don’t stack checkpoints that add little marginal safety but heavy cumulative friction. When a buyer has already passed a robust challenge, do not demand a second flavour of the same thing just to send $10 to a legitimate Indian merchant.
Make the Rails Legible
Small businesses can’t parse dense circulars to discover which providers are authorised for cross-border work this month. Publish a merchant-friendly roster, updated regularly, that answers the only practical question: “Which services can accept international card payments for Indian exporters right now—and on what terms?”
Pair this with a one-page export data schema that plug-ins and no-code tools can ship out-of-the-box. No folklore, no back-channel wisdom—just a public checklist. When rules are legible, entrepreneurs pick compliant routes by default and spend their time building, not guessing.
Individuals Are the Engine
Much of India’s global creative economy is individual, not corporate. Where registrations like an IEC are needed, make them instant and digital. Onboarding should take minutes, not weeks, and it should be crystal-clear what an individual may accept internationally within the de-minimis lane.
If the State trusts a person to open a bank account and file taxes, it should trust them to receive $10 for legitimate work without forcing a foreign client into paperwork theatre. Formal pathways must be easier than informal workarounds, or the latter will thrive.
Say Why, Not “Declined”
A good card often fails for a solvable reason—missing country, absent description—and yet the buyer sees only a sterile “declined”. Mandate plain-English error reasons at the point of failure: “Add billing country (required for Indian exports).” That one sentence converts a dead end into a fix.
Payments are a language. When we speak in codes, customers leave. When we speak clearly, they complete the transaction, and the money lands where it should—visible, taxable, and welcome.
Keep FCRA Where It Belongs
Some worry that frictionless small payments could mask foreign contributions. The answer is not blanket friction. Draw bright lines: not-for-profits and political causes remain under their existing regimes; commercial micro-exports operate inside the de-minimis lane with caps, monitoring, and audit trails.
This split respects both integrity and growth. It reassures regulators without treating every creator as a suspect. It keeps enforcement sharp where it’s needed and light-touch where it isn’t.
Choose Welcome
We say India is open to the world; yet in practice this is how the RBI is blocking small inward remittances to creators, influencers and micro-exporters. Let our rails prove the opposite. Set the de-minimis lane. Publish the roster. Standardise the data. Finalise authentication with common sense. In one quarter we can lift authorisation rates, cut abandoned checkouts, and unleash countless modest—but meaningful—export receipts.
Back where we began: I write a newsletter. People abroad try to pay. The card works everywhere—until it meets a wall that too many Indian creators dread. This isn’t a technological impossibility; it is a trivial policy choice. We can choose a system that treats the $10 subscriber as a potential criminal, or one that treats them as a welcome customer. Let’s choose welcome. Let the $10 in—and tax it.