tinyprojects

Yes, this is exactly what it does! To confirm, Zoneless does have KYC built in - its a bring your own API key system that plugs right in, and you get 500 free verification checks per month via Didit. There are guides in the docs on how this all works.

thank you!

Zoneless is open-source, self-hostable and has no transaction fees

I think there's a few screenshots in some older posts!

Hey thanks! I appreciate that. Nothing in particular; I overhauled the design pretty recently and wrote about it on my blog if you're interested (in my HN bio)

Thanks for the support Peter, I appreciate it!

You can use whichever you like - but yes you will have to abide by their terms.

Zoneless has an open-source checkout to accept payments/subscriptions via stablecoins if you wanted a completely self-hosted alternative. I am very aware that not everyone wants to pay via stablecoins yet, though. People are very open to being paid with them, hence why it works well for payouts.

Thanks, really appreciate that!

Definitely other options out there. The main difference is Zoneless is open-source and self-hostable, so there's no transaction fees charged on top. Zoneless has KYC built in via Didit along with additional risk / compliance tools also.

Thank you good sir!

Appreciate you raising this, especially given your Connect experience.

This is a fair concern. Zoneless does verify the identity of payout recipients through Didit, and marketplaces can require KYC before the first payout. We also have support for blocking OFAC-listed wallet addresses, and also have additional checks to flag suspicious behaviour.

I agree that KYC doesn't eliminate marketplace fraud, though. That's true with Stripe Connect too; Stripe explicitly leaves platforms responsible for monitoring and preventing fraudulent activity even though it handles KYC and provides risk tooling.

I think the area I could make much clearer in the docs is the distinction between identity verification, sanctions screening, and marketplace fraud prevention.

A good way to operate this is to keep using a regular payment processor for checkout, but use this for payouts, so you can still accept cards and enjoy fee savings (there's a prompt on the homepage that will set it up for you just like this).

Zoneless is completely independent of Stripe, you do not need Stripe approval or a Stripe account to run it. We have some beginner guides in our docs for handling topping up / exchanges. I use Kraken+, which is about $5/month and removes trading fees.

Totally get this - one reason I built this was due to the risk of being shut down or rejected from a traditional payment platform. With this there's no risk of being rejected as 1) you can self-host it yourself, and 2) everything is self-custodial on the managed hosting version.

This is mainly for the payout side, but there is a working stablecoin checkout / payments /subscription system in the project - there's no limit on charges, and there are no chargebacks possible because it uses stablecoins.

Going good thanks - it was a tiny side project that span out into being my full time job for the past few years :) A lot of fun to run also.

The marketplace is called PromptBase, which I've been bootstrapping for the past few years (now around ~500k users).

Thanks for this feedback, that could be clearer - the $6 is the total network fees for the underlying rails if you were self-hosting (about $0.002/transaction). The managed hosting option is just if you don't want to host it and run it yourself.

Yes it uses USDC behind the scenes, which is regulated, fully reserved, and designed to stay at $1 (very different to USDT) - there's no Stripe behind the scenes, it's completely independent.

I totally understand where you're coming from, because I felt the exact same, but stablecoins specifically do not suffer from the same crypto crowd problem. They are just a very boring, elegant way of moving money cheaply.

Yes, its mainly for marketplace operators / creator platforms right now to pay sellers, specifically global marketplaces where Stripe Connect may not support the country of the seller. Microtransaction marketplaces (transactions < $10) or so also are nearly impossible to operate profitably under the current fee models of Stripe Connect / PayPal would also benefit.

Zoneless is an open-source Stripe Connect alternative

Thanks! Zoneless was not affected by this

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! It depends on if they make a sale, but we run a daily payout system currently on PB. We've not had any concerns from sellers regarding this, some prefer USDC because it is more stable than holding their own currency.

I've been banging my head against a wall the past few days trying to work out a solution to this. I've yet to make a decision, but my discoveries / theories so far:

- Stripe Atlas accounts are treated separately to regular US Stripe accounts at the moment when it comes to address verification. My Stripe Atlas account has passed this verification fine because of this difference (maybe because Stripe auto-uses the Delaware registered agent I paid for during Stripe Atlas setup as physical address?), but a regular Stripe US account using the same Earth Class Mail address fails verification. Stripe support says this: 'The address given to you on your Stripe Atlas account will be valid as it is provided by our partner, but then for normal Stripe account, one requirement is to have a physical business address.'

- I'm wondering if the Earth Class Mail address for my Regular Stripe US account is failing specifically because it has the words 'PMB XXXX' (private mailbox) in the first line of the address. This address was given to me at random by Earth Class Mail when I created my Stripe Atlas account, and I didn't really think anything of it - but I can see how 'PMB' is an instant red-flag for not being a physical location. The exact error message I get is: 'Invalid address. Your business address must be a valid physical address from which you conduct business and cannot be a private mailbox'.

- Also stumbled across the virtual office solution. Instead of PMB's they have 'suite numbers' in an actual building. I agree it also feels hacky, and likely to come under the same verification issues, but might a short term fix for my PMB issue. A lot of the services I contacted seem a bit shady though. I even emailed one of Stripe's partners (usestable.com) with a specific question regarding if their virtual addresses still work with Stripe, and have so far got no response.

- Co-working spaces like WeWork and Regus offer a virtual office service, which seem a bit more legitimate than some of the specific virtual office services I've seen, but come with a higher price-point.

I will probably try a cheap virtual office solution first, then move onto the co-working solution if that fails. I want to try and avoid switching Stripe accounts if possible as I think it's going to cause a lot of pain with migrating subscriptions etc.

The meta-issue here is the quality of Stripe support. I have paid so much to Stripe in transaction fees, but when a problem like this threatens to shut down an account I operate, all I get from them is vague answers, pointing to documentation, and 'computer says no' responses from people who have no idea what they're talking about.

Worth a shot if anyone can help me out / is facing the same problem.

I'm a US non-resident (from the UK) who registered a business via Stripe Atlas, and used Earth Class Mail (a Stripe Atlas partner) to setup and incorporate my company when I signed up to Stripe Atlas.

Due to the nature of my business, a large majority of payments are micro-transactions, so I spoke with a Stripe employee who kindly enabled micro-transaction pricing on my account.

Fast-forward to a few months ago, and I decide to offer a subscription service for my business at a higher price point. I was advised by a Stripe employee to set up a new Stripe account for these higher priced transactions as micro-transaction pricing wouldn't make sense, so I registered a new US Stripe account using the exact same business details as my Stripe Atlas account (using my Earth Class Mail address, EIN, etc.)

My original US Stripe Atlas account seems to have passed this new US verification fine - whereas my new US Stripe account is threatened to have payouts/payments disabled on March 12th unless I provide a physical US address, as it doesn't like the Earth Class Mail one.

I have contacted Stripe customer support who have not been helpful - if there's anyone at Stripe who can help me with this I would hugely, hugely appreciate some help.

I am facing this issue where I received an Earth Class Mail PMB XXXXX address when setting up my Stripe Atlas account and registering my business (I am a US non-resident), and now my account is being threatened to be shut down in 14 days if I don't get a new address. Is this a problem with Earth Class Mail addresses all being P.O box / virtual addresses? Or have I just gotten unlucky with the address I was dealt?

Much less - 99% of our transactions are < $20, so every time we get hit with a dispute it's already an instant loss in terms of the dispute fee cancelling out any revenue gained back from winning the dispute.

I've only trialled this system recently, but my current results are:

1 Win

2 Partial Wins (basically a loss with how much you get back)

3 Losses

All these payments were fraudulent (a user doing credit card testing) and disputed by foreign banks (Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil). I think these cases are much harder to win, because the actual card holder is technically in the right to request the money back on their stolen card for a transaction they didn't do.

Much better than my previous results of just accepting each dispute though :)

Sure! I basically use PDF Lib to generate a letter with all my evidence bundled into one pdf file. It sucks up data from my database about the user's activity. Format is the following:

Formal 1 page letter with company logo - "Dear Sir/Madam.. writing about $9.99 dispute for card XXXX on X date for user [NAME]" (all this is pulled from the Stripe API).

I then have 5 appendixes on separate pages:

Appendix 1: Users' receipt (just a pic of the Stripe receipt)

Appendix 2: User's order history (just printed, name of items, price, and timestamp)

Appendix 3: Screenshot of the user's purchases page clearly showing the item

Appendix 4: Email confirmations - I store copies of each HTML email sent, so just take a picture of this.

Appendix 5: Site activity with IP addresses and timestamps. This is all user actions on my site (viewing items, purchasing, etc.)

I created it because I had 20 disputes piling up, and I was dreading processing them all. Given that you're likely to lose the majority of disputes, it's super discouraging to put in the work, but this makes it a bit easier (I don't want to let fraudsters just get away with it!).

I was on Stripe Radar's free trial, but it wasn't as effective as I liked - it also turned out to be very pricey paying £0.04/screened transaction. I've now rolled my own combination of IP-based bans on creating checkout links + notifications if a purchase has many failed attempts using diff cards (you can do this for free through Stripe's API). I refund suspected fraudulent transactions religiously without question as the $20 dispute fee is crippling, and have systems that will auto-generate and submit evidence to banks whenever I receive a dispute. I wish Stripe would do more to help!

100% this.

I just used GPT-4 to help build an analytics dashboard using ChartJS. There's so many settings in ChartJS, it would have taken me a week to StackOverflow / Google how to get my charts how I'd like them - it took me a day with GPT-4. I could just ask it anything and it would help no problem. Any buggy code it produced, I'd just copy and paste the error message and it would provide a fix.

The day before I built a basic version of Stripe Radar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35323278

Coding with AI has made me more excited to build than ever before after 10+years of programming.

I really miss firebase function logs. Even though it was a bit glitchy at times, it was the perfect simplified overview of everything on my backend, and fitted well with the simple UI of firebase. I'm sure I'll get used to Google Cloud logs - but it just feels really out of place now.