Feat: Learn + Document How to Setup Recurring Payment Processing

[nelsonic]

Thinking of using Stripe as their APIs are decent. 🧑‍💻
(Fly.io are using Stripe and the interface is seamless!)
Buuuutttt ... from experience, many people have PayPal accounts ... 📈
And then there's Amazon Pay, Apple Pay and Google Play Store ... 🙄

So let's take a step back and consider our requirements. 💭

Requirements

• Simplest possible interface for making/collecting payments.
• Single payments (e.g. Year-in-advance) first
• Recurring payments e.g: Monthly second.
• Understand what is required to create a "Merchant Account"?
• Document everything in as much detail as possible.
• Create a basic App that connects to a Sandbox API.
• Ship the basic app to Fly.io so that we can all test it using dummy credit cards.

Story

As a person wanting to maximise their personal effectiveness,
I want to pay up-front for the service
so I know exactly what I'm getting.

Priority?

I know this might not look like the highest priority when our MVP is far from useful at this point.
But as soon as it is useful, we want to have the pricing page on dwyl.com ready and payment collection enabled
because it lends credibility to the product. i.e. if people know they can pay for it, they know it's "real".

[nelsonic]

@LuchoTurtle how much have you looked into Payment Processing? 💳
Does understanding how this all works appeal to you? 💰
If not, don't worry; it's not everyone's cup-of-tea. 🍵
But if you're keen, please comment. 💬 🙏

[LuchoTurtle]

I've never worked with payment processing before but I guess I'll have a look 👍

[LuchoTurtle]

@nelsonic I have a few questions, as this topic seems a bit broad.

• Should I narrow this to an Elixir API? Flutter?
• Should I use Stripe? The issue implies using other gateways...?

[nelsonic]

For now we just need generic research that is applicable to any programming language that can make HTTP (REST API) requests. This can be Python, JavaScript or Elixir.

When we are creating our example we can use Elixir or Rust.

As for using Stripe, yes, for now that is the appropriate gateway/provider.
I've left it open in the OP because if PayPal has a comparable UI/UX/API and pricing, we could use that.

[nelsonic]

The reason I've left PayPal, ApplePay, GoogleWallet in the OP is simple: Critical Mass.
PayPal has 377 Million active people using their App/service!
There's a very good chance that a person wanting to use our app already has a PayPal account.
And since they most likely are logged into their PayPal on the computer/phone they are using,
then it's just 2 taps to checkout. 🏁 💰 🎉

[nelsonic]

Wasteful screenshot:

Constrained (show just the info needed and minimise whitespace) screenshot:

This might not seem like such a big deal. But these add up over time.
Don't waste people's bandwidth or time scrolling through unnecessarily large images.

I've hidden the "or email" because it's not relevant to this example.

[nelsonic]