Pay any bill with a photo and a credit card using Plastiq

Although paying bills will never be a joyful process, we are lucky to live in a time when the actual process of making payments is easier than ever. Thanks to auto-pay features and other online conveniences, you can at least be sure that the monthly gouging of your bank account doesn’t actually require much effort on your part.

But for as much as things have improved, one of the major problems with modern bill pay is the refusal of many service providers to accept credit cards. This old-fashioned mentality regarding credit payments deprives many people of the conveniences of making large bill payments through their credit card, such as the rewards they could be gaining in the process.

While you could just wait for holdouts to embrace the modern convenience of online credit card payments, a new app called Plastiq provides a much quicker solution to this problem.

Plastiq is a bill payment app that works with your phone’s camera to make credit card pay universal. You simply take a photo of the bill you wish to pay for via credit card, and Plastiq will analyze it for all relevant information. From there, you can pay for any bill with either your MasterCard, Visa or American Express credit or debit card. For this service, Plastiq applies a service fee of 2.5 percent for credit card users and one percent for debit card users.

What’s really impressive about this system is its versatility and security. Even if the bill requires you to pay by check, Plastiq is able to essentially cut a check on your behalf with the funds coming from your credit or debit card. Meanwhile, the already solid digital bill recognition system is backed by human failsafes that make the margin for error as thin as possible.

While this process is just as smooth and easy as you might hope it would be, the most impressive function of Plastiq is actually its bill management capabilities. By taking a photo of a bill, you can either choose to pay for it right away or put it in your “bill stack” section for later. If you’re worried about forgetting about your bills, you can enable notifications that inform you of the absolute last date you can pay your bills so that the payment clears on time. Procrastinators unite!

Plastiq is still a work in progress in many ways, but even in its current state the app offers an invaluable service that’s unbelievably easy to use. Currently available for U.S and Canada residents only, Plastiq can be found for free on the App Store.