We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor
Details
- External ID
- 46048252
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Nov. 25, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 405
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.980349344978166
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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/flowgladDemo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6H0c1Cd2kUFlowglad 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 servicesThis 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 defineWe’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!
Enrichment
- Theme
- payments, billing, and wallet infrastructure
- Vertical
- Fintech
- Function
- Data infrastructure
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- open source payment processor
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No A full payment processor requires deep financial regulatory compliance (PCI DSS Level 1, money transmitter licensing), banking rail integrations, and bulletproof double-entry accounting ledgers.
What it would actually take: The architecture requires integrating directly with card networks or merchant acquirers (or orchestration layers), an immutable double-entry ledger system for balance accounting, idempotent synchronous state management, and strict cryptographic transaction security. Building this requires extensive fintech domain knowledge, compliance certifications, and senior security engineering.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Stripe, Recharge, trigger.dev, DBOS, Clover
Concerns raised: Vendor lock-in and data ownership concerns, Service downtime directly impacts customer app availability, Requires app installation adds friction to customer conversion, Too many abstraction layers between app and payment API, Poor documentation navigation and UX for finding feature details
Feature requests: Support non-TypeScript environments and self-hosted infrastructure, Store billing data on customer's own infrastructure to avoid lock-in, Expand SDK support beyond React to Svelte and Vue, Clear documentation showing which countries are supported, Direct acquiring bank integration as alternative to payfac model
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 98 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #3 of 99 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 25 days after the earliest competitor.
- Flowglad: the Open Source, Zero Webhooks Payments Provider · yc · 2025-12-10 · 32 upvotes · similarity 0.66
- Open-source Stripe Connect alternative · hn · 2026-08-20 · 83 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- A simple pricing and resource limit library · hn · 2026-02-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Zoneless · hn · 2026-04-09 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- I built a tool to show how much ARR you lose to FX fees · hn · 2026-04-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Stripe-no-webhooks · hn · 2026-02-10 · 66 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Credyt · hn · 2026-01-29 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- FeeFlow · ph · 2026-09-21 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a data infrastructure tool for Media & entertainment yet.