I'm Ben / Tiny Projects (I once posted here about buying 300 emoji domains from Kazakhstan…).

For the past 3 years I've been solo bootstrapping PromptBase, an AI marketplace with 450k+ users. At the peak, I was burning $9,400/month in opaque Stripe Connect fees for seller payouts, so I built Zoneless to replace it:

- GitHub: https://github.com/zonelessdev/zoneless

- Website: https://zoneless.com

Zoneless is a free, open-source (Apache 2.0) drop-in replacement for the payout part of Stripe Connect. It allows you to pay marketplace sellers globally with stablecoins (USDC) using an identical API to Stripe and at near-zero fees.

I've been dogfooding Zoneless on PromptBase for 3 months with some good results:

- 2,200+ sellers onboarded

- 1,400+ payouts completed

- Monthly payout fees reduced to just a few dollars

- 73% of sellers, when given the choice at onboarding, actively picked Zoneless over Stripe Connect

A massive part of running a marketplace is paying sellers. While Stripe Connect is a great product, it has big pain points:

- Expensive + complex fees: $2/mo per active account, 0.25% + $0.25 domestic payout fee, $1.50 international payout fee, 0.25–1.25% cross-border fee, 0.50–1% FX fee. It costs >$2 to move $1.

- Limited reach: Only supports around 47 countries.

- Slow payouts: Takes 2-7 days to settle.

- Platform risk: A massive single point of failure if your account gets randomly flagged.

Zoneless is designed to solve all this:

- Payouts cost ~$0.002 on Solana

- Global: 220+ countries/regions

- Instant payouts, 24/7.

- Self-hostable and open-source

The API/SDK is identical to Stripe (same webhook events, same object shapes, etc.). If you know Stripe, you already know how to use Zoneless. There’s also an Express Dashboard for sellers to onboard and track their earnings.

I've been able to remove annoying things on PromptBase like forcing sellers to accrue a $30 minimum balance before a payout just to keep our costs down. I can now also onboard sellers from more countries, which has helped spread the word and grow the buyer side too.

A big worry was that non-crypto users would be confused or hate getting paid in USDC, but they actually don’t mind at all, they just care about being paid faster. If they want to convert to their local currency, they simply use an exchange like Coinbase.

Zoneless is self-custodial, meaning you create and own your wallet, and the code never touches funds. You can also easily plug in providers for KYC/AML.

I appreciate that anything related to crypto is like Marmite (pretty polarizing); I’m a no-coiner and have never dabbled in NFTs, but I do think stablecoins are different: they’re just boring tech to move money around cheaply.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or questions - especially if you've dealt with Stripe Connect / payouts / marketplaces before.

- GitHub: https://github.com/zonelessdev/zoneless

- Website: https://zoneless.com

- Docs: https://zoneless.com/docs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704260

Points: 15

# Comments: 7

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45849205

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

- 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.

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'm a solo bootstrapped founder from England who has been launching tiny projects on the internet for the past few years. I've written about my projects here: https://tinyprojects.dev

PromptBase it the 8th project I've built - I launched it a year ago as a platform for creators to sell their prompts.

Today I released a no-code editor that lets people build tiny AI apps by chaining together prompts - it's a bit like Zapier but for prompts.

You can use it to create AI automations without having to mess around with connecting up APIs. Some use cases are building apps to easily generate designs / prints to sell elsewhere.

It supports numerous models and AI tools (e.g. background removers, image upscalers) that you can chain together.

It's free to try - I would love some feedback if you get a chance to give it a go!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39206204

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

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 :)

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 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.

It worked well, and I managed to prevent several fraudulent cases using it. However, once the trial period ended I was being charged £0.06 per screened transaction(!). This was becoming really expensive with many transactions.

I noticed during my free trial with Stripe Radar that 90% of the time it's quite easy to eyeball if a credit card payment is fraudulent based off of the number of blocked card attempts from the customer, and the number of cards tried - so I wondered if I could build my own version using the free information available through Stripe's API.

Stripe's docs can be confusing, so I decided to try ChatGPT with GPT-4 for the first time to help write code. I described my task, and it created some beautiful Typescript functions that take in a paymentIntent id, and determines if the payment is fraudulent taking into account failed payment attempts, number of cards, and even IP address, country of origin, and email address - all using Stripe's free API!

I've been using this code for a day and it has already picked up a couple of sketchy transactions, but completely free. It's missing things like "Early Fraud Warnings" and info from "Stripe's Network", but I'm okay with that since it's saving me £0.06/transaction.

This is the first time I've used AI in a professional coding sense for a real problem (not just for fun). I'm actually blown away, not only did it save me a bunch of time coding, but the result is saving/making me money - hence my excitement writing this!

I've been coding for 10 years, but this experience using AI felt like something totally different. It's like gaining a team of developers that you can orchestrate whilst you do less of the typing. It's made me more excited to build things than ever before.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35323278

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33431611

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62098767