Brazilian gift cards: big reais numbers, small dollar prices

Brazilian cards surprise people twice. The numbers on the face are large, and the dollar price is small. Both are just the exchange rate doing its work.

Gaming

PlayStation Store comes in R$35, R$60, R$100, R$150, R$250, R$300, R$360 and R$400. Xbox runs R$5 to R$200 across eleven sizes. Nintendo is R$50, R$100, R$150, R$250 and R$300. League of Legends is a single R$100 card, and IMVU does R$10, R$20 and R$50.

Both main consoles on one shelf is more than Canada or Ireland manage. See gaming.

Apps and shopping

Apple from R$20 to R$200. Decathlon R$50 to R$500. L'Occitane at R$50 and R$100. Airbnb from R$150 to R$500 over on travel.

The R$5 Xbox card

Brazil's smallest Xbox card is R$5, the lowest console top-up anywhere in our catalogue. It exists for one job: finishing a total you're slightly short on without buying another R$50.

That's useful because Brazilian shop prices sometimes include tax and sometimes don't, and a wallet a few reais short stops a purchase just as dead as an empty one. Buy the nearest size up, then a R$5 if you need it.

The part people get wrong

Brazilian store prices are famously low once converted, and that tempts people into buying a Brazilian card for a non-Brazilian account. It doesn't work. A R$100 PlayStation card redeems on a Brazilian PSN account and nowhere else, and once the code is revealed there's no refund.

If you want to shop the Brazilian store properly, the route is an account registered there, not a card bought hopefully. Making a PlayStation account for another country explains what that involves, including the part people forget: games bought on that account stay on that account.

Check what you have first with find your PlayStation account region, and buy once you know.