What the payment actually hides
On a public chain, the amount, the sending address and the receiving address are visible to everybody forever. Cluster a few of those together and you have a spending history attached to a person.
Monero hides all three by design: the amounts are encrypted, the sender is mixed into a ring of decoys, and the receiving address is one-time. What reaches us is a confirmed payment — not a wallet we can look up, not a balance, not a history of what you spent elsewhere.
That is the honest scope of it. The payment stops being a public record. Nothing else changes.
What we still know
Exactly what we would know if you paid in Bitcoin, and we would rather you learn it here than assume otherwise.
- Your email address. It is the whole account, and it is how we tell you the balance is running out before a server suspends.
- The servers you create. Label, region, plan, operating system and the IPv4 address assigned to them.
- Request logs with IP addresses, kept 14 days, because abuse reports arrive as an address and a timestamp and nothing else.
- The payment record itself: amount, coin and the processor's reference, kept because an invoice has to exist.
If that list matters to you, read the longer version — it covers what every host physically has to keep and the three places where "no logs" cannot be true for anyone.
How to actually pay
- Create an account with an email address. No card, no phone number, no identity document.
- Open Add funds and choose Monero. The minimum deposit is $20.
- You get an invoice with an address, an amount and a window — three days. Send from any wallet you like.
- The balance lands once the network confirms. Monero blocks come roughly every two minutes, so this is usually minutes, not hours.
- Deploy. A server is up in about a minute and bills by the hour against the balance.
There is no subscription and no card on file. When the balance runs out the server suspends and its disk is kept as a snapshot for seven days, which is long enough to top up and continue.
Where Monero will not help you
Being straight about the limits is more useful than another paragraph of privacy adjectives.
- Your traffic is not private. The datacenter routes your packets. If you need the traffic hidden too, that is a VPN or Tor problem, not a payment problem.
- Some exchanges have dropped XMR. Buying it is harder than it was, and in a few jurisdictions that is deliberate policy. Check what your exchange still supports before planning around it.
- Sending from a custodial account undoes part of the point. If the coins leave an exchange that holds your identity, the exchange knows you sent them, even if the chain does not say where.
- We are not a bulletproof host. Abuse reports get answered and abusive servers get suspended. Privacy in payment is not immunity in operation, and we would rather say so on this page than in an email to you later.