Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467551

Points: 88

# Comments: 69

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48044022

Points: 39

# Comments: 12

For the past few months, we've been building Kelviq and it's finally ready to share.

Kelviq is a Merchant of Record (MoR) and monetization platform that you can integrate without building a custom webhook-to-database syncing layer. Along with handling global taxes, checkout, and compliance, it acts as the real-time source of truth for your users feature access and usage credit balances.

Why we built this: Through our other project, ParityDeals, we saw firsthand how much founders struggle with billing infrastructure. Integrating a payment gateway is easy, but actually building "monetization" is a massive engineering timesink.

To gate features or charge for usage (like API requests or LLM tokens), you usually end up building:

- A fragile, stateful webhook listener to keep your local database synced with Stripe.

- Custom idempotency layers and retry queues for missed events.

- Hardcoded feature flags scattered across your codebase to gate access based on tiers.

- Custom scripts to handle edge cases like upgrades, prorations, and grandfathering legacy users.

Because of this tight coupling, every pricing change, whether it's moving a feature to a new plan or switching from flat-rate to usage-based, requires a database migration and a code deploy.

Our Approach: Entitlement-First Most billing setups require you to manually bridge the gap between a payment event and your product state. Kelviq simplifies this with an entitlement-first model. You can still use webhooks if you need them, but our SDK allows your app to simply ask Kelviq for a user's current access state at runtime. It eliminates the need to maintain a homegrown subscriptions table just to gate a feature.

How it works:

Zero Webhook Syncing: Stop maintaining a homegrown subscriptions table. Use Kelviq SDK to check if a user has access to a feature before serving the request.

Real-Time Metering: Push usage data to our API at the atomic level (e.g., 1,500 AI tokens). We instantly evaluate it against their tier, deduct from credit balances, or add it to their end-of-month invoice.

Decoupled Pricing: Product and growth teams can change pricing models or tweak overage caps directly in the dashboard without engineers touching the codebase.

We built this to compress weeks of custom billing logic into a few hours of integration. Kelviq also supports multi-currency, built-in PPP pricing (with VPN and proxy protection), and digital product delivery with licensing.

Any feedback is highly appreciated!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47233137

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Later, when I quit my full time job to build my own startup, I needed something for survival. The first project I picked up again was lightGallery. It was already quite popular back then, so I decided to rewrite it from scratch and implement dual licensing.

So, basically the trust and adoption were built over years when it was free. The monetization came much later.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516648

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45393254

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45297809

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

You end up handling many webhooks, mirroring Stripe data, tracking subscription states, and hardcoding feature checks.

Managing upgrades, downgrades, migrations, overrides, and grandfathering often needs custom scripts.

ParityDeals keeps that billing logic out of your app.

Once you integrate ParityDeals SDK, you can manage everything from a single dashboard. No further code changes required.

I'd love to hear your feedback

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45183250

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952602

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

I'm launching my personal project, TimeMaster.ai, today. TimeMaster is an automatic time and productivity tracker for Mac.

TimeMaster runs quietly in the background, automatically tracks and categorizes your activities, and shows you precisely how your time is spent. It tags projects, creates time logs, and provides insights to boost your focus and productivity.

All tracking data is stored locally on your device and is never transmitted anywhere.

I'd love to hear what you think

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391810

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

I built this tool to monitor who's using my JavaScript libraries. However, it takes a lot of effort and resources to keep the project running.

I'd love to know if it could be useful to you too. Any feedback would be really appreciated.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40598209

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40378427

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40298022

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35916347

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33618823

Points: 2

# Comments: 0