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Show HN: We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor
Hi HN! For the past bit we’ve been building Flowglad (https://flowglad.com https://flowglad.com) and can now feel it’s just gotten good enough to share with you all:
Repo: https://github.com/flowglad/flowglad https://github.com/flowglad/flowglad
Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6H0c1Cd2kU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6H0c1Cd2kU
Flowglad is a payment processor that you integrate without writing any glue code. Along with processing your payments, it tells you in real time the features and usage credit balances that your customers have available to you based on their billing state. The DX feels like React, because we wanted to bring the reactive programming paradigm to payments.
We make it easy to spin up full-fledged pricing models (including usage meters, feature gates and usage credit grants) in a few clicks. We schematize these pricing models into a pricing.yaml file that’s kinda like Terraform but for your pricing.
The result is a payments layer that AI coding agents have a substantially easier time one-shotting (for now the happiest path is a fullstack Typescript + React app).
Why we built this:
- After a decade of building on Stripe, we found it powerful but underopinionated. It left us doing a lot of rote work to set up fairly standard use cases
- That meant more code to maintain, much of which is brittle because it crosses so many server-client boundaries
- Not to mention choreographing the lifecycle of our business domain with the Stripe checkout flow and webhook event types, of which there are 250+
- Payments online has gotten complex - not just new pricing models for AI products, but also cross border sales tax, etc. You either need to handle significant chunks of it yourself, or sign up for and compose multiple services
This all feels unduly clunky, esp when compared to how easy other layers like hosting and databases have gotten in recent years.
These patterns haven’t changed much in a decade. And while coding agents can nail every other rote part of an app (auth, db, analytics), payments is the scariest to tab-tab-tab your way through. Because the the existing integration patterns are difficult to reason about, difficult to verify correctness, and absolutely mission critical.
Our beta version lets you:
- Spin up common pricing models in just a few clicks, and customize them as needed
- Clone pricing models between testmode and live mode, and import / export via pricing.yaml
- Check customer usage credits and feature access in real time on your backend and React frontend
- Integrate without any DB schema changes - you reference your customers via your ids, and reference prices, products, features and usage meters via slugs that you define
We’re still early in our journey so would love your feedback and opinions. Billing has a lot of use cases, so if you see anything that you wish we supported, please let us know!
- clintonb 11mo ago> Not to mention choreographing the lifecycle of our business domain with the Stripe checkout flow and webhook event types, of which there are 250+ You don’t need to listen for all event types if you aren’t using _every_ Stripe feature.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 11mo agoSure, but everything from the Stripe UI down to their API is feature creeped. I remember using it 10 years ago and I got it working in 10-20 minutes. Last month I see it up for my new project and it took almost a whole day
- tyre 11mo agoWere you using it in the same way?
- agreeahmed 11mo agoI'd bet the typical payments integration has more complex requirements now than those from 10 years ago. That's what usually happens as a space becomes more important and, therefore, more regulated. Usually new entrants will come in and try to provide a tidier interface for solving an increasingly complex problem. In payments, as others in the comments have pointed out, that process is hampered by the gatekeepers involved. You'd have to commit to building an amazing developer experience and navigating bank partnerships and compliance (per country), risk, antifraud, etc. That's why the payments devex feels so behind the DB, hosting, or auth devex today.
- Scubabear68 11mo agoYou setup a payment flow and it took you less than a day, and you are upset? I don't understand.
- huflungdung 11mo ago[dead]
- 11mo ago