Ask HN: How hard would it be to clone Stripe? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How hard would it be to clone Stripe?

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I live in a country where online payment is strictly regulated by the government. International payment is not even available, only from local clients to local merchants and the process is very painful for both client and store.

I saw Stripe the other day, and I thought I can make something like this for local merchants to:

1- Provide better payment

2- Make online payment available to new people that weren't able to afford it.

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So, Tl;dr : How much work do think it would be to clone Stripe for a local market?

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I would say that when it comes to payment solutions, 85% is about dealing with regulations and laws in your country/local area. The tech part is 15%. Stripe is easy to use but I am sure they spent tons of time/money dealing with red tape and regulations and rightly so.

I studied the system and I can see more or less how to deal with the red-tape.

I'm wondering beyond integrating the payment APIs on the backend and managing tokens, how much hidden work is there?

There's probably a lot of work to do around security, reliability, availability, consistency, and auditability. When you're handling money for other people, you're a major hacking target, and the standards for reliability are much higher than your typical SaaS. You need to make sure that every transaction happens exactly as requested and that you can recreate exactly what happened when in case of questions and concerns.

This sounds right and the way these regulations are set is bullshit.

Sure, there should be regulations but it shouldn't lead to large fees and make it difficult to pay or receive payments online.

You have to comply with PCI DSS or whatever their proper thing is called for payment gateway provider. You will likely need external audits.

This may not be a requirement outside the U.S. But even if your country doesn't have similar requirements it'd be smart to look into PCI regulations. At least some of them do represent good baseline practices for security.

It has nothing to do with US it's requirements of Visa Mastercard etc.

(I work at Stripe.) Where are you based?

Tunisia.

If you want to talk in private, my email is in my profile.

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