Show HN: We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor

github.com

405 pointsagreeahmed223 comments

Hi HN! For the past bit we’ve been building Flowglad (https://flowglad.com) and can now feel it’s just gotten good enough to share with you all:

Repo: https://github.com/flowglad/flowglad

Demo video: 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!

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I don't get why you're calling it A) a "payment processor", even though you don't process any payment yourselves, and B) "open source", even though it's running everything through your SaaS and presumably also storing data in your databases (not speaking about telemetry but real business data). I struggle a lot with building a more flexible system for feature gates, usage credits, payment schemes etc., so I 100% understand the pain point you're addressing, but I don't feel like you're delivering much on your headline.

The license file states MIT and AGPL licences

For the library that links to their SaaS, not for their entire product.

The SaaS is open source too, it’s AGPLv3.

Pasting the full root license file below: — Flowglad is fully open source.

- ./packages: MIT

- ./playground: MIT

- ./platform: AGPLv3

Glad to hear the pain points resonate with you, and we’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how we could address them better.

Re open source: the SaaS is under AGPLv3, and the rest is MIT.

Re “processor”: often when payment providers first get started they don’t fit into one of the established payment vendor categories because they need to piggyback off someone else’s infrastructure. We figured it would be better to make clear that we’re not a billing SaaS, but also providing payments processing - even if for now that’s through Stripe Connect.

Eg we are aligned with our merchants in worrying chargebacks in a way that “bring your Stripe key” billing SaaS is not, because our setup means their chargebacks are a concern for us similar to how they’re a concern for Stripe.

Could you elaborate on how hard it is to use a different payments provider? I use Clover API with my bank being the acquirer, which is much cheaper than Stripe.

Very interesting. How do you handle billing with that setup? Are there billing SaaSes that will integrate with that set up, or did you have to build your own?

Since we’re the payments provider (using Stripe under the hood), we’re not currently able to support “bring your own provider” unfortunately.

My bank is an acquiring bank. They are also local so I far prefer having a direct face to face relationship with them.

They use Clover’s platform to provide devices and APIs (you could in theory use another vendor’s devices if you really wanted to).

In general, I don’t want someone else to be my payments provider since we do a lot of subscriptions, which would leave me completely locked in to a provider. Already been there done that with PayPal.

If you want to have a direct relationship with your acquiring bank then yours would is a pretty optimal flow.

For folks who just want to get set up and get going quickly and don't mind working with a payfac to do so, we feel they should have more options, especially when it comes to DX.

I'd actually be an ideal customer of yours.

I want to have a consistent developer experience and a flexible platform regardless of which payment provider I'm using. I might also be offering a service to other people who want to "plug in" their own choice of payment providers.

Right now, I have to build all the subscription stuff myself.

Oh I did not realize the whole „SaaS“ is open source, too! To be honest, the „payment processor“ part primed me in a way that I didn’t even investigate about the backend, I assumed it to be closed source due to that. Thank you for the clarification!

About the „processor“: IANAL, but I would assume that a payment processor has liabilities and regulations similar to that of a bank - line it’s the case for PayPal or Stripe. On the other hand, no one would raise a concern of you were forwarding transactions to Visa or some huge bank, so this is probably just a communication issue that you might want to tackle upfront.

Yes, we have similar compliance things we consider to Stripe and PayPal. We believe the best experience will only need one onboarding, which would mean we need to process the payments (even if we use Stripe under the hood to do so for now). That’s why we decided not to build a BYOK flow.

This thread has been eye opening for revealing how much more clearly we could be explaining the funds flow story. Thank you for your feedback!

It looks like this does make some things easier, but I'm not sure if it's actually better.

From what I can tell, any time you use this to check something like the customer's subscription state (or anything else payment-related) - either from the front end or the back end - it's going to perform an API request to Flowglad's servers. If you care about responsiveness, I'm not sure that's a good idea. Of course, you can cache that state if you need to access it frequently, but then it kind of defeats the purpose of this layer.

Stripe integration can be tricky, but if you don't want to store anything locally, you might as well just hit Stripe's APIs without the middleman. For the payment systems I've worked on, having cached state in the database is actually really nice, even if it's a bit more work. Want to do a complicated query on your customers based on payment/subscription state and a bunch of other criteria? It's just a DB query. With this, I think you'll be hoping they expose an API to query what you need and how you need it. Otherwise, you'll be stuck waiting for a thousand API requests to fetch the state of each of your customers.

Yeah this very true.

We have a plan to allow you to store more of this data on the merchant's side and still benefit from the work we've done to refine our data model, and make the SDK super usable. Even if you do hit Stripe's APIs, you will need to maintain mappings of price ids to your plans, your plans to what features you grant for each, stripe customer ids to your customer ids, etc. That's the kind of grunt work and maintenance burden we'd like to eliminate.

Plus, Stripe is explicitly designed to be a write-optimized system, and discourages[0] using them as a realtime read layer. We're super early in the journey but that's the problem we want to solve: how can we give software devs the same unified money movement + value movement experience that Shopify has availed to DTC brands for nearly 20 years?

[0] https://docs.stripe.com/rate-limits

That means you would need to expose your proprietary code and you will be left with no moat.

All of the code seems to be MIT and AGPLv3. Where is this moat?

For any given good solution, there will be a core 20% of prospects with more money than patience and/or capacity who would rather you just do it for them. Their propensity to trust you to do so goes up if they understand how you're going about it.

> you will need to maintain mappings of price ids to your plans

I think you're overvaluing how much work this is. For years I just created the plans in Stripe and then manually copied them over into my database. If you're small and not changing your plans often, this is fine.

When eventually I got annoyed because I had a Stripe sandbox and my own staging environments I wanted to sync periodically, I banged out a 'sync' script in a couple hours. Could probably do it even less time with AIs these days.

> your plans to what features you grant for each

I don't understand how your service can even help with this. "Features" are necessarily part of my app, I have to define what the user is purchasing.

> stripe customer ids to your customer ids

It's one extra column.

Maybe you can call it 'grunt work' but how often are ya'all putting up new SaaS's?

Even if you can somehow keep your latency to a minimum, if you have even a second of down time, my app goes down with yours. I don't like that. Right now if Stripe goes down for a bit, nothing happens to my app. It keeps chugging along. Maybe some of my customers can't pay their monthly subscriptions for a bit but they're not locked out of the app.

This whole thing feels like a trap TBH. Feels like vendor lock-in. I am kind of locked into Stripe because it'd be a PITA to re-integrate with something else, but at least I own the data (sans credit card #s, which I don't want) and can move elsewhere if push comes to shove (well... OK, asking everyone to re-enter their card # would suck too).

The "storing my source of truth externally" is super fair, and something we plan to address soon by giving you the ability to store this data on your side. So you'll still get all the benefits of our data model and full stack SDK, but aren't locked in to our hosting.

> I don't understand how your service can even help with this. "Features" are necessarily part of my app, I have to define what the user is purchasing.

We let you define features that you reference using slugs that you decide, and then group those features with products. So when someone subscribes to the product, they get the features you defined and associated with that product. So to see whether they can access a feature (boolean):

useBilling().checkFeatureAccess('fast_generations')

Or to see if they have enough credits to take a usage metered action:

useBilling().checkUsageBalance('fast_generations')

The problem we're trying to address is a bit broader than just storing price ids. You use your customers' payments state to derive billing state, and you use billing state to derive app behavior (what features they can access, what usage meters what balances and whether those are sufficient to continue consumption). You need this data on your backend and your frontend. So a substantial amount of most CRUD app code is just managing, transposing, and shuttling this kinda of data around between backend and frontend.

For fun I once mapped out a vanilla SaaS checkout flow and realized that it required a developer to coordinate 15 server-client boundary hops [0]. Each one is a liability that you have to maintain. And the flow as a whole is one of the most frustrating to test. If a developer came up with this flow on their own, we'd immediately say it smells. But it's the flow required by the current best-in-class vendors.

And it's not entirely the result of complexity intrinsic to the domain. Much of it is the result of decisions made over a decade ago that haven't really been revisited. At least in React-land, we've learned a lot in that time about how gracefully different patterns for state management age in a codebase. The last time the webhook-only pattern was the frontier of DX, Redux was the considered the best state management framework for React.

I haven't seen Redux in React code in a very long time, maybe 6 years. Not because Redux is terrible - in fact it represented the community's best understanding of state management at the time. But over time we realized the limitations of Redux as a framework, and engineered our way out of them with new frameworks. This process is natural and beautiful and part of what makes technology magical. In payments, this improvement loop is significantly rate limited. Because to build a truly better solution you have to commit to all of the uphill compliance and financial services work that people have very astutely pointed out in other comments.

[0] https://x.com/agreeahmed/status/1965258666892034257/photo/1

Congrats on getting to beta!

I very much relate to the problems you're trying to solve, so much so that I have created a Stripe integration library [0] that has very similar DX to flowgrad! (not nearly as feature rich however). I've also written a blog post as to why I built it[1].

Key difference is where the final billing information is stored, our library also ships db schemas and the webhook handlers write to that local db.

You should also check out our (open source, MIT) library[1] this is built on, it could be useful for you guys!

[0]: https://fragno.dev/docs/stripe/quickstart

[1]: https://fragno.dev/blog/split-brain-stripe

[2]: https://fragno.dev/docs/fragno

Congratulations on the beta launch, an impressive product we will consider integrating.

As a relatively new developer, I'm curious why the dependancy on React?

Was there no way to get the UI you wanted without implementing a framework like React?

We are Svelte based, so it's frustrating for us to have to drag in React for libraries like this.

That’s a great point.

We started with React because that’s what we knew best and the community we were most embedded in.

We have no dogmatic attachment to React. We hope to support Svelte and Vue soon. We’ll start on that once we feel that our data model and flow are sufficiently nailed down that we feel comfortable committing to porting our SDK to other frontend frameworks.

Appreciate the response. I suppose the follow up is, why not make the library framework agnostic initially or work towards that, rather than have to maintain support for x number of frameworks into the future?

That’s a devilish engineering question. If you are truly framework agnostic you limit how much work you can do for your users, because a lot of the work happens inside of the framework. We decided we’d commit to doing the work so our customers didn’t have to.

E.g. most web apps have some endpoint that the client calls to initiate a checkout session by calling their payment processor’s server SDK.

How many times has the following code been implemented because no payment processor ships a route handler and a React hook (pardon my React-brainedness)?

Someone has to do the work to get that checkout request from your frontend to your payment provider and then back so you can redirect. In a just world, that your processor’s SDK would handle that work. Otherwise it falls on your plate.

Yeah, I've run into this many times.

If you can assume the framework someone is using, you can deliver a powerful, comprehensive integration.

If you instead try to build a generic one that anyone can use, then it's both hard for you to build it, and hard for everyone to integrate with it because it's generalized.

Exactly. If you’re too committed to framework agnosticism you end up leaving your users a bunch of last mile work that they have to do with every integration, and maintain through every pricing model change.

May I suggest web components? For all their warts, they are perfect for a use case like this. Even React, the IE of frameworks, supports them properly in v19.

amen

You should look at using Preact (4kb alternative) and supply your frontend code as fully encapsulated with embedded preact. That way you client would only have to render your widget/app into an existing DOM element:

> customPreactRootRenderFunction(document.getElementById("outlet"))

> We are Svelte based, so it's frustrating for us to have to drag in React for libraries like this

To be fair, chosing Svelte over React explicitly means that - if the React installed/userbase is 10-50x as big, you will be frustrated with this a lot. But in the end I don't get the frustration, in the end react is not a framework and you can render any component into a single HTML node that is part of your Svelte system. If the external library is encapsulated well, you shouldn't even notice that is react based.

Of course this means importing a ton of new libs and frontend code just to render billing. It's the same with the dependency on, say, Next. It's too many moving parts, could've been done without tying yourselves down to specific ‘cultures’. That said, it's a great endeavour and my hat is off.

Appreciate the feedback. This work happens in all frontend "cultures" (a phrase I will be lovingly borrowing, thank you). But a payment provider can't really take this work off a developer's plate unless it provides an SDK that works inside of that culture. So yeah, we hope to ship the best payments experience for React. But eventually also for Svelte and Vue. Because that's what you'd have to do to solve this problem.

And the problem goes substantially beyond billing UI. There's all the unseen tedium that devs need to implement in order to derive proper app behavior based on their customers' billing state. Most of this work is transposing billing state (and its derivatives) and then lugging it to the client where it will be used to show upgrade buttons, gate feature access, show outstanding usage balances, etc.

For what it's worth, the landing page is one of the most beautifully designed things I have seen in a long time. Congratz on the launch, didn't want to be so negative. I just hate that this is built on top of Stripe :(

I liked it too, reminds me of zed.dev...

Thank you, Zed's is so beautiful. Our team's blushing

Thank you, that's very kind of you.

Funny thing about the site: we deliberately tried to keep it single-page because we spent all of the past year building / testing the billing engine, data model, and SDK.

Do you have any more details on how you designed the site? I see that it was in framer.

Yooo, founding designer here.

From a technical perspective, building it on framer was pretty easy, though, it has some limitations with more complex SVG imports. I mirrored the Shadcn global.css color variables from the portal on the website for a more consistent vibe. Definitely recommend that.

From a design perspective, I wanted something radically simple, with taste. The narrow width visually demonstrates simplicity at a glance. I love narrow sites. Instinctually feel amazing. The double dashed borders will eventually turn into “flowing” lines. Which is a Flow of funds reference. We also worked with primary studio to help us choose some colors, typography, and patterns we’ll likely introduce later.

Hope this helps!

The reason webhooks are popular is because they are easy, reliable and they work.

Now I might have to spin up a whole area of infrastructure I may not yet have to track eg usage, subscription tier, cancellations etc

Webhooks are absolutely the right tool for async / background jobs, or events driven domains. I’m not sure payments, and its flip side of entitlements, is best modeled as an events-driven domains.

In a perfect world money would trade hands and you’d just see what that meant for the features or value your customers could access accordingly. This is what happens in other domains of online commerce like Shopify. Shopify has webhooks but they are not the primary load bearing site of payment integration for most storefronts.

Payments webhooks were, from what I can tell in the history, a hack for side stepping gnarly problems in domain modeling and read optimization.

Cards don't really need webhooks (unless you get into 3ds). Other payment types may need webhooks because they are fundamentally async.

3DS is a big deal in Europe, and card payments can be disputed. So I'd argue that credit cards are async, too, at least on some edges that can be expensive to ignore.

Because of PSD2 (regulating card payments in the EU), 3DS, including multi-factor authentication with an application or sms, are mandatory in the EU.

> I’m not sure payments [..] is best modeled as an events-driven domains.

But payments are event-driven in reality. Credit card charges can be disputed, some transactions only succeed after a delay, or transactions or refunds you thought were successful turn out to actually have failed. Some payment methods are more susceptible than others, but even credit cards are affected by some of this.

The point is, stuff will happen to your payments without you initiating the change, and out of your control. Like, you know, events. Now you will need to become aware of them, and either you keep polling updates for a lot of your payments to catch the one that changed, or you have the information pushed to you.

Webhooks are great for that.

(Edited because a word was missing.)

How does this work in terms of having a merchant bank? Surely you need something else besides this repo right?

You still need to have a payment provider / merchant account, so that part remains the same

For all I could see this is no different than any other payment gateway service. Well, it is different in one important way: you'll pay a higher percentage per transaction, since the middle man needs to make money somehow.

With Flowglad you’d pay ever so slightly less than you would with a vanilla Stripe integration which usually includes Stripe Billing. That total cost is 3.6% (2.9% per charge + .7% for billing) and $.30, whereas we’re 3.55%.

We’re not really trying to compete on cost. But we certainly aren’t more expensive once you include the cost of Stripe Billing.

Yes, while this is OSS, we haven't yet figured out how to self host an acquiring bank partnership... For now we're using Stripe Connect to set up a merchant account through our Stripe Connect platform. So as long as you are a legal entity (individual or business) in the countries that Stripe does merchant acquiring you should be good to go with us.

Eventually we want to get to a place where we are embedded deeper on the payments side. But for now that's the flow.

> 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.

Sure, 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

Were you using it in the same way?

I'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.

You setup a payment flow and it took you less than a day, and you are upset? I don't understand.

But you do have to figure out which ones are salient to you and how they map to your specific app's lifecycle.

As a very small example: would you need to handle `charge.succeeded` and `payment_intent.succeeded`? How would you dedupe processing these events vs `customer.subscription.created`? Today, there's a lot of incidental knowledge about your payment processor's specific approach to webhook events that you need to know in order to integrate them.

Yeah, this isn’t great today. We have been exploring Webhook bundles/groups for common integration shapes that make a bit easier to make the right choices based on what you’re doing and hope to have something out here to help soon.

Having to figure out which of the 100s of Stripe event types we need to handle and which ones overlap was the most stressful part of adopting their system. Simplification here is welcomed.

But who actually processes payment? Is it stipe, bolt or some other payment processor?

How can any of this work without dealing with credit card payment processors

Under the hood we are using Stripe to process the payments, but you set up a Stripe sub account through our platform using Stripe Connect

I was wondering what the catch was, seemed pretty lightweight to be a payment processor. My first thought reading the setup guide was "what no HSMs?"

how much fee do you take

We built our own billing engine so the total cost to you is .65% (on top of the normal 2.9%). By comparison Stripe Billing costs .70%

Only stripe?

Calling it a payment processor is a bit of an issue. The term "payment processor" has a very specific meaning in the world of online payments, and this isn't it.

This is a frontend for Stripe, so it's even a bit of a stretch to call it a Payment Service Provider. Payment gateway maybe, but really it's a Stripe frontend.

For those who are wondering, like me, what is this? Is this a new alternative to Stripe? The answer is: no. This is an added layer of abstraction on top of Stripe.

For now, yes. The game plan over time is to get deeper into the actual card rails side of things. But first we really want to nail the developer experience.

Who cares about developer experience? Genuinely asking, because I’m a developer too and I certainly don’t care. What we care about is solving the actual problem of payments with the downstream companies.

Stripe became dominant by improving developer experience, which cuts implementation costs.

“Well your payments platform doesn’t actually do payments, but the developer experience of doing nothing was flawless!”

Sorry for the snark, but been in payments a long time, and seen too much of this nonsense.

DX = developers not shooting themselves in the foot and making it impossible to cancel my free trial because my account got deleted but the autopay didn't

fewers bugs = happier customers not getting charged for shit they didn't agree to be charged for

Basically this. The existing integration paradigm for payments, at its worst, feels like a warehouse filled with footguns on the floor with the lights turned off. Esp for newer developers who are used to more modern devexes which explicitly try to take reasoning about complex state transitions off of your plate.

100% This. I remember joining a billing team that assumed calls to Braintree succeed or fail, so everything was just calling the API as though it was a local function call.

It was great fun debugging the twice annual incidents where the API returned a HTTP500 but charged the customer and created the recurring subscription anyway.

Not to forget we had to scream at them for 6 months to implement 3DS2 on top of their Subscriptions API. Turns out we were the only users of it!

You can't standardize the developer experience across different processors. I'm not trying to be negative here, just practical.

You are going to run into things like TSYS closing out batches every three days regardless of what happens.

The handling features for them and their customers thing is going to be a herculean task over even a couple different platforms. Not impossible, but it's big and you would do well to see what's out there before committing to a standard interface. Take a look at https://datacapsystems.com/ to see it done well.

Also, adding another layer like this, you better have an early plan to staff a support desk.

Oh, also, you are gateway, not a processor.

> Oh, also, you are gateway, not a processor.

Technically right now we are a value-added payment acceptance reseller. Eventually we'd like to become a payfac. And maybe with the new regulations that came out in Georgia, a chartered merchant acquiring bank. But that's down the road.

You're totally right about standardizing the devex across processors. We want to go as "close to the metal" as we realistically could as soon as we could. That's why we very deliberately built our own billing engine from scratch. We could have gotten to market faster by just mapping onto Stripe Billing, but we would have foregone valuable experience mapping processor lifecycle events to our data model. For a while that's going to be much of the work on our plate, standardizing how we map their lifecycle to ours.

We took the past year basically studying the prior art and developing / testing a data model that we feel is well on its way to describing the general case. I was frankly surprised how long it took to really hammer out the primitives.

Technically you are a wrapper api, but you are acting as a gateway. Though, if you were to claim to be a gateway you'd need pa-dss/ssf validation and that would cost a good chunk of that yc money, so I understand.

Exactly. One of our advisors who previously an exec at one of the card networks says that currently we are technically a "value-added gateway reseller".

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but that's the most precise way to describe us right now. And not necessarily where we will stay.

> We want to go as "close to the metal" as we realistically could as soon as we could.

All of the value in payments is on the top (acquiring payfac side)...all of the value on the issuing side is only made via extremely high volume and requires a ton of tech that just schleps data (no fun). I'd recommend getting this idea out of your head.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, I think you might have gotten sides mixed up?

Issuing side (the side that "issues" the cards) is usually the one that people describe as "all of the value", while acquiring (the side that "acquires" merchants) usually is that one that needs to bring substantial volumes to market.

For context to anyone not familiar with payments, about 60-70% of the card revenue in a transaction goes to the customer's / issuing side because they are the side that assumes credit risk for the consumer. The merchant's / acquiring side has significantly tighter margins and usually needs substantial volume before it can become an interesting business. One way that entrants on the merchant side of the stack monetize is by bundling value-add software.

E.g. Stripe does this with Billing (+.7%) and Connect (+.25%).

Fwiw I agree that most people will find this tech extremely un-fun. But I'm a "payments rail guy" in the way that others might be "train guys". My inner child lights up at the thought of payment rails. My Substack, Vivid Leaves, is basically a bunch of essays about historical payment systems - some we worked with in Kenya, and others I studied from the USSR. I wrote all this before I had any idea I'd be starting a payments company: https://agree.substack.com

We know it's going to be a schlep, and we're going to have a blast schlepping through it.

* vocab fyis for anyone reading this not familiar with payments.

Nope.

> Issuing side (the side that "issues" the cards) is usually the one that people describe as "all of the value"

In theory you could argue "all of the value" may be there, but that is locked up across issuing banks and the credit card companies themselves. You basically cannot compete there unless you have some novel way of creating a credit card that isn't Visa, MC or AMEX. There is also a reason banks haven't consolidated on the issuing side because it's an uninteresting business for them, otherwise they would. Hence the credit card side is all about volume and hence all of the value for software providers is on the acquiring side.

> The merchant's / acquiring side has significantly tighter margins and usually needs substantial volume before it can become an interesting business.

You're myopically looking at one part of the acquiring side. Controlling the merchant relationship means theoretically unlimited upside, versus the issuing side that is usually capped by regulated interchange fees or market pressure. There are thousands of providers that sit on top of Stripe (and other similar providers) and charge 4%~7% and capture the residuals (which is a higher BPS than Stripe itself), hence this is where the value is. Stripe et al compete on volume because they themselves get volume discounts on the underlying providers (e.g. if you have a high enough volume Stripe will charge you less than the rack rate...just like everyone else that provides a software gateway). I would argue the economic value created by providers sitting on top of Stripe is greater than the value Stripe generates for themselves.

> My inner child lights up at the thought of payment rails.

Payment rails for Visa/MC/AMEX is very different than your experience with moving money at banks in Kenya/Russia. I've actually seen the tech that runs the rails for payments in the US. If anyone thinks the Paypal dev experience is bad, wait until you see this shit.

The DX of Stripe is already great—it sounds like you want to give Stripe reasonable defaults. Not a bad idea, but if you know what you're doing, you can have AI read the Stripe docs and implement something based on established patterns. Who is your ICP?

> The DX of Stripe is already great

This used to be the case back in 2015, but not anymore. The financial compliance is more strict now. You have to charge taxes. EU enforced SCA / 3DS in 2019. All of these are hard to implement (correctly) on their own - almost impossible together.

Source: I run (paid) Ruby on Rails library for Stripe subscriptions integrations. I also do billing audits. Here's an example audit where I pay $30, get ~$2000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuXp7V4nanU

Today our ideal customer is someone starting a project on day one who wants an easy pathway to 1) get stood up ASAP, and 2) start iterating on pricing as they learn what customers really care about. What we found when talking with dozens of builders was that the DX is indeed much better than e.g. Adyen, Braintree, etc. But their DX is far from the counterpart best in class devtools in auth, hosting, or databases.

To be clear, what Stripe has built is a towering accomplishment. But a lot of why innovation in payments DX has been slower than other parts of the stack is that since Stripe, there haven't really been many others who have attempted to tackle the *entire* job to be done.

That's fine, but it does mean that your current submission title is factually incorrect. You didn't build a payment processor, you build a payment gateway.

You intend to restrict this to a single market? There's some sibling comments that do point out that.

Much "annoyances" when it comes to money is all those weird laws and rules from lower level companies in place, improving things for developers is a laudable goal but I do hope that you guys have some real world experience with these systems apart from frustrations as system users because doing a good DX right now feels like it could make you end up in a dead end.

100% agree - this is not a space to tread into lightly.

We have some really knowledgeable payments people in our corner, including several veterans with many decades of payments industry experience as leaders at the big payments players. There's a lot that we've been able to learn from them as they help us navigate the financial services side of this business. We're conscious of how much work there is to do, and how the "good DX" is really just the visible tip of the iceberg.

Currently through Stripe we are able to onboard merchants wherever Stripe can serve them directly. Our upcoming merchant of record offering (which we hope to launch soon), will be available to merchants wherever Stripe can send payouts, which is a longer list of maybe 150+ countries.

The pathway to building deeper payment rails will indeed have to be country-by-country as each one requires new banking partners and compliance regimes.

So, this is somehow similar to Polar (https://polar.sh/)

Pretty much my 1st question when I see a new billing product. Thank you for answering that. I don't understand why products like these hide that fact or keep it hidden. A great product that requires connecting a payment processor can still be a great product but it is not an actual payment processor and that part needs to be clear immediately on your landing page.

It's probably because "we built our castle inside Stripe's kingdom" doesn't sound very cool.

However, if enough people start using this then they might become the new gatekeepers because they could swap Stripe for any other payment processor without the need of the user knowing.

Their website says fully opensource and since it’s a Stripe wrapper, this seems to be an opensource alternative to Stripe Elements. It does require a Flowgrad account and key so it will provide value if other payment processors started using it.

Is there any benefit to using Flowgrad’s react components and hooks over Stripe elements directly?

I thought the whole post was about the benefits, namely that Stripe has too many webhooks and doesn’t handle enough of the tax computation.

Did I misunderstand something? Or is this about a different angle?

Ah that is another benefit, using Stripe Elements and Stripe directly, you have to save the subscription ID and other fields in your database. Flowgrad seems to handle this on their side.

The benefit is that our hooks get entitlement data directly to your frontend. Stripe Elements just focus on payments forms. But what about how payments state impacts what features or usage credits you grant? Stripe doesn’t handle that; they leave that as a concern for your business logic to figure out. The result is glue code you need to write to keep your application database up to date with the ground truth in your processor. Usually through brittle, messy webhooks code.

With Flowglad’s hooks and server SDK, we get that data to your frontend and backend. So you can read it from us wherever you need it.

>However, if enough people start using this then they might become the new gatekeepers

Stripe would likely change their ToS and then revoke their API keys before they could get anywhere near that level of dominance.

It’s not very well hidden, it took me around 15s to figure it out from the main page. They are also trying to diversify (obviously).

The landing also doesn't clearly answer if they use their own stripe or we need to connect our own stripe account.

That feedback is very well received, thank you.

Currently you set up a new Stripe Connect account to get started. We tried the "connect existing account" flow and discovered that, maybe due to regulations or Stripe policies, we weren't able to debit the existing accounts.

Our Stripe flow is different from the run of the mill billing SaaS because we're involved in the movement of money (rather than simply using your Stripe key to steer API requests on your behalf).

We know that makes us look a bit like a fish with legs while we grow towards where we want to be.

I believe that means you are more or less setting yourself up as a payment facilitator, meaning you and your other merchants will be kicked off Stripe at any time if too many of your merchants misbehave. Is your compliance team ready for that?

They hide it because you won't choose them if you were aware that it's Yet Another Wrapper around someone else's service.

This is great feedback. We aren't trying to keep it hidden at all. But we could be clearer in how we communicate it.

The processing happens through our Stripe Connect platform, through which you currently have to set up a Stripe account. Over time, these details will be more abstracted away, much like Vercel is reselling AWS under the hood but doesn't require you to hand over AWS keys.

Right now, the reason this feels more like a "wrapper" than Vercel is that we haven't yet built out our own onboarding and KYC flow. We wanted to first deliver an amazing developer experience - something we're still working towards.

All good. You know HN feedback is straight and brutal but we are all trying to be helpful.

I’ve been in software long enough to know that there’s a market for products that make things slightly easier for devs and their managers who think even common APIs like stripe are too hard. The number of devs who are struggling with web hooks and simultaneously have some budget to spend is probably bigger than you think.

Often these products are pitched and sold to non-technical managers, too. The sales team will learn that they can make some sales by promising a non-technical manager that buying this product will actually save them money because it’s easier to use.

Literally describes one company I work for periodically.

I'm sorry, but seeing the words "dev" and "struggling with webhooks" in the same sentence makes me cringe.

I mean, I have nothing against higher level abstractions, but I'd be worried to ship (as a dev) and use (as a customer) a product that was built by someone who does not have deep understanding of what they are doing.

I had the pleasure of working with teams that couldn’t even figure out how to use analytics in their product. They had zero idea who was using it and how many people were using it. They ignored the thousands of DB deadlock messages in the logs; well, they just ignored the logs completely, actually. All they cared about was shipping the next feature and getting the one QA guy to agree it was working correctly so the ticket could be closed.

This is much more common than you might think.

That describes more than just one POS (Point of Sale) company I know of.

Your example is hilarious; it sounds like the team understands analytics just fine if they're solely working towards one metric.

This is the default. I have a few teams like this under my charge, currently.

I ask them to protect themselves by logging what data they will need to troubleshoot a new feature.

Next release comes around and there is an issue and guess what...devs asking for access to prod to troubleshoot because they don't have logs.

It is really difficult to contain oneself when getting on a call to quiet three endless chat threads because someone failed to log basic shit.

Days long anxiety-filled shit storms for absolutely no reason.

I have had other teams that would do this and they had to have the fear of God put into them to wake up and start logging. We have real problems to solve without confounding ourselves...

There's a lot of React devs out there who have never touched a server-side anything.

I feel like fullstack engineer was a BigTech manufactured title designed to save costs compared to hiring two experienced engineers, one in frontend and one in backend, but ended up leaving the fullstack engineers in a limbo state where they are neither good at frontend, nor good at backend, hence they require a bunch of (VC funded) tools to "simplify" their development life.

It's really not hard to be good at both. Or at least to understand enough to be fluent in both.

There was a time when “full-stack engineer” actually meant someone who could run an entire application end-to-end—HTML/CSS, backend, databases, nginx, Linux servers, deployments, the whole thing. As Big Tech productized those environments and startups realized they could merge multiple roles into one salary, the title became increasingly attractive. People saw the compensation associated with true generalists and started putting “full-stack” on their CVs even when their experience only covered a slice of the stack. Bootcamps and junior developers adopted the term too, and hiring managers kept accepting it because the candidates were otherwise solid.

Now the title has been diluted to the point where it often just means “comfortable with JavaScript on both sides of the wire, plus maybe Mongo or Redis.” The original depth is gone, replaced by tooling and abstractions that compensate for the skills the term used to imply.

It’s a sad world.

-- actual (retired) full-stack engineer

If I claimed to be a generalist, would HR understand what I mean?

To the contrary, I feel the distinction to be very arbitrary and especially in the context of web applications so muddy it’s almost useless. Who is responsible for websockets? CSP? JavaScript chunk caching? Web worker edge deployment? File uploads? HTTP/2 stream usage?

The web as a platform shouldn’t be constrained by two arbitrary, isolated boxes, because that’s not how it works. A software developer writing code necessarily has to get involved with stuff running on client and server devices and everything in between them out of sheer necessity, if they even want to understand how modern technology works in this space.

As the Javascript ecosystem has spilled out from just the frontend to also the backend, a lot of these React devs have found fullstack responsibilities on their shoulders.

Imo you can trace a lot of how devtools, particularly webdev tools, have evolved to this. They are more React-brained. Specifically they try to take state management responsibilities off their users' plates.

Webhooks are not a struggle conceptually. They are a struggle operationally IMO.

In amy case why does a dev need to understand a (yet another) poor DX complex API (stripe) in addition to the other 20 they need to deal with. What is wrong with taking something off the plate. It is like daying dont use high level languages, use Rust, don't use a library to make http calls roll your own etc.

I think Stipe is one of the best designed APIs I ever had to work with.

But to reply to your point, there is no way out of this. You either understand the tools you work with, or you end up vendor locked to tools like vercel/next (the target audience of OPs tool, as it seems), which promise simplification, but end up being their own monsters.

Even the best developer in the world can struggle when there are like 250 webhook events on a platform (as is the case for Stripe).

Definitely - it's the nature of software that it tends towards higher order abstractions that make the tools easier and easier to use. The final frontier is English as a programming language. The tools that are easiest to program in English (via a coding agent that "compiles down" your prompt into code) tend to have the tersest APIs, with the least amount of reasoning about state across service boundaries.

It's very likely at this point that the supermajority of future programmers will have almost no formal computer science education. They'll want tools that don't require a deep understanding of the prior generations' layer of abstraction. That's kinda the world we're preparing for - builders who don't need to be deeply technically involved in the details of their vendors in order to build successful software companies

It looks like this is more akin to a React-only Chargebee where entitlements etc. are stored with the billing provider.

(Apologies if I am misreading the site.)

It scans that way right now because Stripe is more visibly involved in the onboarding process. Maybe another way to parse it is "Shopify for software", where we combine the movement of money and subsequent state transitions involved in unlocking value. But instead of shipping physical items, it's granting entitlements.

Either way, thank you for the feedback. We're still refining how we explain it.

> we combine the movement of money and subsequent state transitions involved in unlocking value

> it's granting entitlements

This is what Chargebee is doing[1]. I believe Zuora is another big company operating in the space.

1 - https://www.chargebee.com/entitlement-management/

There are a few billing engines that have shipped entitlement management offerings.

We’re focused on making the best DX for managing entitlements as possible. A lot of that comes down to details: cloning pricing models across environments, React hooks to manage your state. We want to build something you pick to build with on Day 1 - rather than something your boss tells you that you have to use.

I misunderstood this at first, it looks like the SDK & code is open source but all the billing data is sent to Flowglad servers so you don't 'own' your data?

Yeah exactly, it's a very misleading title in every dimension.

You can make it even easier

And serverless

Just have the client redirect to your checkout flow, and it redirects back with a signed payload. Like oauth. Done.

Make an HTTP interface that’s easy to curl, as well as a Javascript library to assemble the request and verify the result.

Client JS can handle own postbacks. Maybe not even to their own domain.

Or maybe client server will read that querystring in the resulting request and verify signature.

Totally up to the customer.

Finally, have the sdk also have an option to load an iframe (eg in a dialog) instead of redirect, and use postMessage for securely sending signed result. Just make sure to use Intersection Observer v2 in that case https://web.dev/articles/intersectionobserver-v2

DONE

PS: Hire me ;-)

While you do the banking side, I can integrate a ton of web3-enabled stuff for you including invoices across blockchains, recurring subscriptions, as well as contests and auctions for price discovery. See https://intercoin.org/applications

This looks like a REALLY cool tool for tech-focused startups. I like that its not just resolving the stripe bloat but also the code. You can setup a full production-ready payments processor without worrying about the code.

I'm wondering - is there some overhead required to keep operations up? Or Flowglad takes care of everything between code and compliance

Also, sick sweater I have the same one XD

This isn't quite a boilerplate to start your own payment processor - but an open source payments provider which you does the entire job to be done: handling the flow of both money and value inside your app. And yes, for now your coding agent + our MCP and SDKs handle the code. Our API handles the state management of entitlements usage credits etc. This is the really messy part that hasn't been well addressed yet by incumbents.

And then we, alongside the processing partners we use on the backend (currently Stripe, soon hopefully beyond) handle the rest.

Re the sweater: great minds ;)

Very cool guys. Curious about a few things if you’re open to sharing:

- How are you handling tax/VAT and edge cases? Like usage backfills or retroactive credit grants, etc. etc.

- What’s the failure mode if your service is down?

Either way, refreshing to see someone go after this with the opinionated DX!

Very helpful callouts - both areas we want to build more robust product coverage.

Handling tax and VAT edge cases are coming up on our roadmap. We want to offer a merchant of record service soon, and eventually make it so that you can steer the funds flow at a per-transaction level.

We monitor our uptime closely[0], but we're also working on giving more options to self-host the source of truth component of our offering for people who want to be more in control of their certainty.

[0] https://status.flowglad.com

I have an idea. Would be happy to get feedback + criticism.

What if there was some standard API interface for payment processors? Basically AWS S3 API, but for payment processors.

The idea being that migration between payment providers should be low friction and standardized. If you're in Stripe jail or banned, start using paypal (or something else) just by changing endpoints + credentials.

Since Stripe is the gold standard, we could standardize on that (like how cloud providers standardized on S3).

I think India has implemented something to this effect.

Thoughts?

It won't work, the feature set offered by different payment processors differs too much to capture in one consistent API. Even Stripe itself already offers 3 or 4 different ways to integrate with them.

What you want already exists though, and it's called a payment orchestrator. They integrate with different payment providers and provide you one API. You pay for that by getting a much smaller feature set.

This would be awesome, it's just really hard to manifest because every payment processor is different, has different life cycle events, etc. They also have different risk and antifraud functions, which you have to consider because they shape how their checkout components behave. And then they also all have slightly different payment methods that they support, each of which behave slightly differently.

You can kind of get something that approximates this with a PCI vault or a payments orchestrator, but it's really hard -- maybe impossible -- to fully abstract away all the differences.

or maybe you dont abstract it away, let each payment api behave the way their service supports, add some common functions on top that users can use and for specific functions they always look for specific classes. Ex class Gateway { abstract function send(), abtstract function receive() } class Visa extends Gateway { send()...receive()..., otherVisaSupportedFunctions() } class MasterCard extends Gateway { ....}

Quick feedback from a Stripe and Braintree customer, who wrote their own subscription system so as not to use Stripe Billing. The things that caused me problems in the past:

* inflexible subscription system

* unreliable web component for gathering credit card information

* unreliable 3DSecure implementation

* incompetent support (these four are the main reasons why I switched from Braintree to Stripe)

* complex and untestable flows for non-mainstream payment types (e.g. SEPA direct debit, IDEAL, etc — Stripe makes you think they will just work, while you need to implement complex logic in your system to make them work)

* PCI compliance (Braintree hires SecureMetrics, they audit everyone even if you are below PCI thresholds, and the audits are idiotic; they complain about ssh version numbers on Ubuntu LTS systems which have all current security patches, etc)

* US-centric thinking about invoicing, which makes invoicing unusable (I issue invoices only after a successful payment, because I owe tax on all invoices including unpaid)

* lack of B2B subscription billing using proforma invoices

Things that would worry me looking towards the future if I were to switch a payment processor now:

* pricing (this matters in spite of what HN often says)

* lock-in (Stripe Billing was free, then 0.5% of revenue, then 1% of revenue, what's next?)

* reliability of 3DSecure, as problems here are extremely difficult to debug and easy to blame on "customer's bank"

You might note that this list contains mostly non-technical items.

But overall I'm very happy to see competition in this field. Payment processing is in a sad state and there are not nearly enough companies doing this.

> US-centric thinking about invoicing, which makes invoicing unusable (I issue invoices only after a successful payment, because I owe tax on all invoices including unpaid)

This sounds strange. I don't think there's anything US-centric about considering an invoice to be a payment request — which makes issuing them after payment nonsensical.

That doesn't match what I see. Shops don't issue an invoice until the product ships, well after payment.

> invoice to be a payment request — which makes issuing them after payment nonsensical

Most EU countries use an accrual-based VAT system, where taxes are owed on any invoice issued, paid or unpaid.

This makes issuing them before payment nonsensical, because you will end up paying taxes on invoices that will never be paid, thus ruining your business.

A proforma invoice exists specifically for the purposes of quoting and requesting payment.

Could you elaborate on inflexible subscription system and also what you would like to see from a 3DSecure implementation?

Full disclosure: I'm a dev at a fintech startup and we're currently working on these two things so I'm curious how our direction lines up with your thoughts

> inflexible subscription system

For example, Braintree can't switch from monthly to annual billing (or the other way around). You have to delete the subscription and recreate it with a different billing period.

I want my customers to be able to switch plans, billing periods, currency, and buy additional items (user slots), all with proration.

> what you would like to see from a 3DSecure implementation

I would like not to see anything, really. I want to forget 3DSecure even exists. Stripe largely gets this right. Braintree required me to do many rather bizarre things, pass additional data, and then rewrite the entire flow once every couple of years or so. With the last rewrite, I was told that in my case (SaaS subscriptions) I would need to drag the customer through 3DSecure TWICE and that there is no other way. So I switched to Stripe, because I value my customers' time.

Also, 3DSecure with braintree would fail every once in a while and I would get customers from various countries telling me they are unable to subscribe. Braintree support, after a week or two, would inquire and either tell me it's the customer's bank (not helpful), or tell me that I have to rewrite my integration to a New Way of Doing Things, which was usually so far off the mark for my use case it wasn't even funny. I just checked my E-mail archives quickly for "Braintree support", over the years I'm up to around ~400 E-mails exchanged.

> I issue invoices only after a successful payment, because I owe tax on all invoices including unpaid

(IANA I am not an accountant) but how is it legal? as a customer you want to pay against an invoice, and AFAIK it is required by law in most places.

You pay against a proforma invoice, or if your credit card gets charged automatically, there is no proforma and you just get an invoice that confirms the transaction.

But in general, this is why proforma invoices exist.

Stripe billing definitely leaves something to be desired and agree that a layer on top can improve the DX tremendously.

What differentiates you from competitors like Lago and Autumn?

Gotta say we admire both teams, and have a lot of respect for anyone trying to make progress in this space.

As far as differences: both are an additional service you need to bolt-on in addition to signing up for Stripe. We're aiming to consolidate onboarding as a single provider that both processes. A lot of work still to do on our side, but that's where we want to end up: that you get your dream devex without needing to sign up for 2 products.

Both are essentially billing-only services where you bring your API key. We have a billing engine that we built from scratch, and are actually processing the payments, currently using Stripe Connect under the hood.

Lago seems to still require you to deal with webhooks - if not theirs, then Stripe's - and is focused on "billing as write operation" (their first-class concern is producing a correct, well-formed charge or invoice object). We want to solve both the "read" (what features can my customer access, what balance does their usage meter have?) and the "write" more conventional billing operations like charges, prorations, converting free trials to paid, etc.

With Autumn we're tackling a similar problem but they currently still require you to use Stripe Billing + your API key. So you'll be paying for Stripe Billing + Autumn (unless you self host). Overtime as we get deeper into the money movement side of things our paths will look more different, as more of our devex will include smoother ways to handle funds flows, tax compliance, etc.

And compared to both, at least from what I can tell from the outside, we're putting relatively larger share of our brain cycles towards making our SDK and docs deeply intuitive for coding agents.

We want to design our default integration path around the assumption that you will have a coding agent doing most of the actual work. As a result we've got some features like e.g. an MCP-first integration path that makes it easy for your coding agent to ask our docs pointed questions that may come up as it integrates Flowglad. And a dynamically generated integration guide md file that considers both your codebase context. A lot of that is the result of our own trial and error trying to integrate payments with coding agents, and we're going to be investing a lot more time and care into that experience going forward.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Best of luck!

I am not a smart person. How are you avoiding using webhooks but giving the same functionality? I read the materials but still don't understand.

We eat all the webhook pain so you don’t have to. Much of our code is dealing with complex state transitions triggered webhooks. We just avail you the end result.

Instead of having to implement all that yourself, you just read the latest billing and entitlement state for each of your customers from Flowglad:

const billing = flowglad(user.id).getBilling()

const hasFastGen = billing.checkFeatureAccess(‘fast_generations’)

Oh I see, you're still running a server, the open source bit is just your SDK. I thought your entire system was open source and didn't understand how you could trigger workflows without webhooks. Makes more sense now, thanks!

What are you using to manage your workflows on your backend?

We're using trigger.dev for processing workflows and we really love the product (and team)

Oh excellent! I'm the CEO of DBOS, and we're fans of trigger too. If you ever branch out from typescript or need to run on your own infra, we can help you out!

UX (from a dev standpoint) : I want to know if it works in France. I click on "which countries are supported". It reveals a link to the docs instead of a countries list. OK, I click the link. I'm in the "getting started" section with no obvious link to the countries list.

I gave up there and probably won't come back.

How do you guys handle past due / grace period if there are no webhooks? Like, do you notify the end-user that their card failed and they need to update their card? Or do you let Stripe send emails?

What's your approach to 3DS and related race-conditions for subscriptions? In my experience 3DS is by far the biggest problem for subscription integrations - not the webhooks.

Grace periods and past due - our current default behavior is: - when the first charge fails, we block access - when the n+1th charge fails, we continue grant access until you cancel their subscription

There's a lot of work to do to make that behavior more configurable, because every merchant has a different policy.

For 3DS we're working on getting more explicit coverage for. Not quite 3DS but related: we currently have it set up so that if your customer successfully adds a payment method but the first charge fails, we also won't grant entitlements in that case.

Lots of weird payments edge cases to work through still.

This feels like adding a skyscraper of abstraction layers between my app and the stripe api… maybe i got old but wow wtf

Polar prohibits: Human services (custom development, design and consultancy).

Is this the case with Flowglad? We have a SaaS with a monthly team seat fee + usage fees, but we also offer a bespoke service where we may bill per hour or bill per project (for work done and delivered inside of the SaaS). So these would be higher ticket.

Would you support this?

Polar is built on Stripe, and so is Flowglad so it's safe to assume that they prohibit exactly the same things.

This is why we committed to getting deeper into the payment processing side. Yes, we can service this with our current arrangement because we are not a merchant of record. When you process payments with us, you are the settlement merchant.

When we begin our merchant of record offering, you will not be able to use it to sell human services. That’s not a Stripe regulation but has to do with the merchant of record offering and the compliance posture you need to build for that service.

How does the actual payment processing work? Do you need a Stripe token or Braintree or some other fixed provider?

They say they use stripe for now

Currently we're using Stripe to process payments, so you get all the benefits they provide for antifraud etc. baked in. You don't need to provide a Stripe API key, you just go through a Stripe Connect account creation through us. You're still the settlement merchant.

Over time, we'd like to go deeper on that layer of the stack. But it's a long journey and we're still super early.

This is like a Stripe wrapper? Similar to Recharge Payments… the flow looks identical, well almost.

Currently it feels more like a Stripe wrapper because we haven't yet fully in-housed the onboarding experience. But you don't bring your Stripe API key, you setup a Stripe Connect platform account.

Recharge Payments looks cool, also seems more focused on Shopify stores?

yes, Recharge is strictly Shopify, although the do allow some custom integrations.

I've been an early user. Big fan of what Agree and team have managed to build here.

Is it using Stripe under the hood? Who is the actual payment gateway provider?

Yes, it looks like its using Stripe Connect under the hood. So these guys are just middle men.

I have to say, this is a great approach to open source licencing: https://github.com/flowglad/flowglad/blob/main/LICENSE

It makes it very clear, and easy to understand.

- ./packages: MIT

- ./playground: MIT

- ./platform: AGPLv3

Feels like pricing is becoming a moving target again. Cursor’s experiments showed how fast teams will change plans the moment usage patterns shift, and LLM speed only accelerates that loop. Every new model drop forces you to rethink what’s “metered,” what’s “included,” and what users actually feel in the product.

The part that buckles first is always the billing logic. Not the API calls, but the lifecycle math behind experiments… and the experiments never stop now.

So anything that lets teams iterate without rewiring state machines every week is going to find an audience. Most people just want to ship, test, adjust, repeat, without their billing layer collapsing under the pace of AI.

Nice launch!

Thank you! That’s exactly what we saw after speaking with a bunch of devs. They wanted to iterate on pricing as they all figure out how to price their AI products.

It turns out that the architectural changes that make that easier also make the tool generally easier to use for a bunch of different use cases.

In urban planning they have a name for this: the “curb cut effect”, whereby urban planners found that curb cuts, that had been made for a specific accessibility need such as people in wheelchairs, ended up being useful to all kinds of people: cyclists, people walking at night, pedestrians with weaker joints.

Devtools seem to benefit from a similar curb cut effect, where gains in a tool’s usability for one domain generalizes across many others.

Zero webhooks is a bit optimistic over the longer term, surely?

Payments are getting slightly more asynchronous, not less.

GNU Taler already exists and was built by actual experts.

https://www.taler.net/en/

Copy pasting the front page:

> We provide a payment system that makes privacy-friendly online transactions fast and

> Payments without registration

> Data protection by default

> Fraud eliminated by design

> Not a new currency!

> Empowers communities to run their own payment infrastructure

> Free Software

imho this is a non-starter for mass market payments.

let's say a customer has found your website and wants to buy something. they first have to install a third party wallet app, fund the wallet by buying coins thru an exchange, then use the app to make a payment to the merchant.

it's the same UX problem crypto has tried (and failed) to work around, but with extra friction since it still depends on local currencies and has an unnecessarily obtuse deposit fees formula that emulates physical coins.

Unless I'm missing something, this is a complete nonsense comment.

Obviously you have to install the app, that's true for any app. But you only have to do it the first time around.

Are you just saying that this payment app has the first time friction of downloading the app. That's the same for all apps. Are you just saying that friction exists, and is a barrier to entry?

I don't need to install an app to then purchase a subscription on pretty much any web app on the internet.

You want to make conversion as frictionless as possible. Making potential users install another app to make a purchase will lose you lots of potential customers and money.

All apps have to be installed the first time.

'Not writing a single line of code'... so the code cursor wrote doesn't count?

Is your pricing ON TOP of what Stripe charges? Are we bringing our Stripe API Key to this?

No that’s the total cost to you. This isn’t a BYOK setup, you create a Stripe account through us using Stripe Connect

This is great! Where does the Stripe Connect process happen, I'm not seeing it in the dashboard?

You should be able to access it via the “Set Up” tab in your navigation bar. It’s step 3 “verify and enable live payments” - we’ll clear up that copy, thank you for flagging!

I have created OpenSpend recently but still very early stages.

It looks like you need to update this file https://github.com/flowglad/flowglad/tree/main/platform#read... Its still using the Mintlify starter kit

thanks for heads up, fixing

Any plans on building the Stripe Connect features?

Definitely solving a real problem!

i do wish i could vibe code payments. stripe is good but LLMs need help.

give the product a go and lmk how vibe coding payments performs

We're working on getting there. What got us out of our seats to build this was realizing that LLMs still struggled with the fairly basic data modeling and distributed systems problems that existing payments providers pose. Any solution they came up with was only ever narrowly correct, brittle, and a nightmare to maintain

LLM generated Javascript to process payments sounds insane. No need to create stuff just because it's possible.

Why would I use this when polar.sh exists?

Seems like just another entry into this space. Also, you should probably change the title of this post because this isn't a payment processor, you are not processing payments in any way at all. You're just a middleman with a UI, and a nice UI can be good, but it's not more than that.

so stoked for this! excited to build on top of flowglad

Payment processing is not a technical problem. It is a problem of risk. That is why we have providers and things like banks.

Totally. When you look at the history of payments processing usually new entrants start with a significant technical improvement and then quickly graduate into learning how to pricing new types of risk

what would look like a Blazor integration?

> 2.9% + 30¢

Very expensive!

That's Stripe's transaction fee, not theirs

Don't think there is a cheaper alternative to stripe. Polar and Dodo is 4% + 40¢

Braintree says it is 2.89% + $0.29 USD. Specifically priced at one bip and one cent cheaper lol

Name "Braintree" is much worse than "Stripe" so them being one bip and one cent cheaper is completely cancelled out.

Isn't this pretty much what every processor everywhere charges? I have been out of the industry for 10+ years but I remember this being pretty standard.

It ain't by much, but we're a tiny bit cheaper than Stripe when you consider how much they charge for Billing (.7% for them vs .65% for us). And pretty much every Stripe integration uses Stripe Billing (unless they pair with a 3rd part billing SaaS)

> pretty much every Stripe integration uses Stripe Billing

Isn't Stripe Billing only for subscriptions?

Stripe Billing handles subscriptions and usage based billing now. Most software products fall in one of those two categories, or sometimes both. As a result, most software companies are paying more than 2.9% + $0.30 for Stripe, closer to 3.6% + $.30.

To only pay Stripe 2.9% + $.30 they'd need to only use Stripe just for charges, and either build their own billing engine (usually poor use of time) or use a 3rd party SaaS.

Ahhh so this is mainly for subscription software companies? That also did not come across.

As we approach Black Friday in the US, I'm thinking of the giant volume of e-commerce transactions that are not subscriptions (or usage-based), and of which Stripe gets a cut. It sounds like you are not angling for that part of the market?

Not in the immediate term at least. Our initial focus is deliver an amazing experience for software builders.

Standard.

When Stripe entered, people stopped caring about the cost of payment processing. I don't work in the industry anymore, but Stripe became rather popular at the time where I worked on online payments. We looked at it, because the Stripe API and services are really nice, but the cost is just insane.

We where never even close to 2.9% on credit cards, and we'd certainly never consider paying 30¢. Part of that is working out of the EU, that caps your credit card fee, so around 1% and 0.10EUR per transaction is closer to the standard. Then you can start negotiating lower raters from there, depending on the number of transaction you make.

Something tells me the main problem with payment processing is integrating with card companies like visa and mastercard, and not whether you use webhooks or not (if I understand correctly how online payments work).

Yep! I would love for somebody to actually solve that problem.

Visa and Mastercard don't want you to integrate with them. They want you to go through an intermediary that they can have more contractural control over and that they can rate limit and monitor.

Closer-to-the metal integrations with providers is definitely a big headache. Solving that problem takes a bit longer because you need bank partnerships, in many cases have to pass compliance screens, etc. We're aiming to tackle the more tractable part first which is the developer experience

If you're trying to be like Vercel—it's a red flag for any reasonable person when you clearly spent more effort on your landing page than your actual product. What made Stripe so successful is that, I personally would not even attempt, like you said, "integrations with providers" "bank partnerships" "compliance screens" because that sounds basically impossible.

"It's hard so you shouldn't try doing it"

thank you, very productive reply

I'm not saying they shouldn't be doing that. It's actually the opposite—they got the VC money, they might as well do something actually useful with it.

That's definitely the gameplan. We believe very sincerely that developers deserve more choice when it comes to payments than they currently have. It's a central reason why we started building this.

It just takes longer to make progress on that problem because of all the institutions involved.

we're lucky enough to have a founding designer who makes it look easy in about a week - we spent about a year on the product in silence.

so I can replace Stripe?

[under-the-rug stub]

[see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988611 for explanation]

What sold me on flowglad was the single source of truth and not having to hold customer stripe info in my DB. Although it took me a little while to figure that out lol

Six minutes after this story was posted on HN you made this HN account to post this. So when you say it took you a little while to figure out... by little while you mean less than six minutes?

I appreciate your concern and can understand your suspicion of when my account was made and when this post was posted. I am in their discord, because I have used their product for about 6 months now, and they mentioned hackernews, and I was curious because I have never heard of it. Now does that mean my comment about how the product has helped me in my projects is now not valid? Have a great day, and either try it or dont, but no need to try and bring me down for supporting a company that has made my job easier.

Okay, fair enough. It just looked like a sockpuppet account, but okay, I believe you you're real. Sorry.

FWIW your claim here is false: "Everything you have commented on this post has been negative". I don't think this comment of mine was negative: "the landing page is one of the most beautifully designed things I have seen in a long time". Also note that when someone criticized the level of fees, I responded to that comment by saying that the fees were "standard" (as opposed to high). So just to set the record straight, not "everything" I commented here was negative.

I hadnt seen those, and went ahead and edited my comment to remove that.

I care about my own developer experience. If i can save a headache and some time integrating payments, I'm all for it.

This is a needed abstraction! Love the idea of bringing a reactive DX to payments. I'm keen to know: Is Flowglad the source of truth for feature/credit state, and how do you achieve low latency for real-time feature gating?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com