Show HN: Open-source Stripe Connect alternative
zoneless.com43 points by tinyprojects 4 hours ago
43 points by tinyprojects 4 hours ago
Hey, I'm Ben. I built Zoneless because I was paying so much to use Stripe Connect on my own marketplace. The fees were really, really bad, and it was also limiting in terms of the seller countries I could onboard. To give you an idea, I was paying around $9,000 per month in fees just to run payouts. Using Zoneless, that cost goes down to around $6.
I've been using it personally for the past few months, and onboarded 5,000+ sellers and done 3,000+ payouts. 74% of new sellers on my marketplace choose Zoneless over Stripe, which is really interesting. I appreciate crypto and stablecoins are a bit of a touchy subject, but for this use case of sending global payouts cheaply, it's perfect.
The project is open source with an Apache 2.0 licence, which means there's the benefit of no lock-in and no risk of your account getting flagged or shut down. It also has an almost identical API and dashboard to Stripe.
Would love to hear any feedback you may have in the comments.
There are others that use stablecoins but also handle the legal side like KYC and AML, I was looking at Coinflow for one, so you're probably better off using them. It's worth noting that this offloads the KYC/AML component to someone else down the road, but doesn't protect you from possible money laundering risk (e.g., you send USDC to a sanctioned individual who launders it into monero or something else). I'm no lawyer but I did work on Stripe Connect's compliance pieces for five years and I would NOT take the risk of (as a business) sending money to USDC addresses without actually verifying identities. It also doesn't offer you protection against fraud (which is a huge problem that marketplaces face). Frankly the missing piece to this is a real, actual identity verification component. If you're not checking identities against sanctions lists at the absolute minimum, you're not doing your due diligence. I wouldn't take that risk. The last thing you need is to be on the receiving end of a US Treasury inquiry. 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. How do you handle refunds & chargebacks? And do you have a maximum amount that can be charged? For context - I'm building a marketplace for artists and struggling to find a global payouts rail. The ones that exist have really high turnover requirements or reject new marketplaces that deal with higher value physical items due to chargeback risk. 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. Cool project, what is your marketplace you are referring to if not a secret? Also the pricing is not very clear - you mention your costs went down to $6, but the first paid tier is $99/month ? 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. Out of interest, how is it going with PromptBase? Love the idea, does it have legs -- ie are you making money? 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. Should also be noted that you have a fantastic handwritten blog that everybody should subscribe to. Keep up the good work! Who's your target customer, marketplace owners? 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. read it again, ah this is USDC but not sure if that is still safe, i know tether has a lot of issues and fragility and some very dodgy stuff so take normal cards then pay out in USDC....is that safe? 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. yeah USDC seems more legitimate but banking risk I wonder if it changed since the silicon valley bank situation where it depegged to something like 80 cents on the dollar and USDT still hasn't published their audit despite KPMG signing off on it.... its these systematic risks that makes me wary but I understand your product now and I think that it makes sense but do you need Stripe approval ? how will i take card without stripe ? stripe is very strict about certain categories great work and thanks for explaining in detail but as a crypto skeptic I think I finally see one use case here that is legitimate. my only gripe is "where do i get usdc and how to keep it safely" coinbase, metamask....these things add a lot of friction and exchange fees where i have to turn USDC into USD those have to be considered 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. very good thanks again for your replies ive never dealt with crypto hence these questions i think stablecoins and zoneless makes a lot of sense, stripe connect is very expensive. for keeping regular payment processor for checkout....is that stripe? aren't they looking and evaluating your marketplace and then saying yes or no still ? or do you mean to use a high risk processor?
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