I'm pretty sure you're right. Laws are like traffic lights: nothing is actually physically preventing you from driving through red lights, it's just that you might get in trouble if you do it. "Might" being the operative word. (And there are a lot more traffic cops than spam cops.)
I clicked the article title in dread fearing someone had turned Stripe the company into a mirror image of everything we loathe about Paypal. I was relieved to realize the OP meant the ease of use part of Paypal, and not all the rest of the baggage that comes with Paypal.
I'd have clicked the article with less dread had it been titled "How I made Stripe as easy to use as Paypal in 5 days".
Just a bit of feedback on your test forms: Your credit card number doesn't chunk the credit card into segments, making the input really difficult. And the sliding text when fields get focused is distracting.
Also as a question. Does my subdomain have to be nickw.easybill.co or will it be specific to my account? (not clearly stated)
I love the concept and the design. My suggestion to Drew is to post screenshots of forms or – better yet– actual dummy forms on spacebox.io's home page.
If I hadn't read the post, the actual website wouldn't have indicated how great this is.
> The main thing that surprised me about this build was: it wasn’t a “hack-a-thon”. I wasn’t killing myself and never sleeping. Instead, it was just super normal days. Loved it!
For me, this was the most insightful thing: that the "5 days" were really 5 days, not 10 days compressed into 5 days.
I had been thinking about setting up a simple donation page for a website that I run. I saw this post and decided, heck, why not. I had never touched Stripe or (clearly) Spacebox before.
I was done and receiving donations in just about twelve minutes. The longest part of the whole process was logging into my bank account to find my account number.
This looks great, but I feel like everyone is forgetting about wepay. They are exactly in this market and are usually overshadowed by stripe. I'm testing them out soon, and hopefully I'll be a happy customer.
Best of luck with this Drew. Looks like a great simple approach for folks jus wanting to "collect some damn money" - a lot of payment platforms require a much higher bar be cleared to get started, that is what it looks like you ace here (especially with the form builder - brilliant)
Your offering will naturally grow an expand as Stripe does so - smart move.
Yeah, I like yours better for sure. But please don't compete on price! Charge for the useful analytics and CSS customization. louisck's web developer should use your product for his next $5 video and you deserve to get paid for that.
It strikes me as very sad that in bringing down a monopoly (Paypal), already you are advocating price collusion amongst the new players in the industry...
I think the real point he's making is that it shouldn't be free. Stop giving away your work for free. This is what made the iOS market so hard to make money in.
What, you spent 4 months working on that app? Dammit 1.99 is just too much to pay for that. Oh it's free? What the heck are these ads doing here. I hate your ads. Go F* yourself. Seriously. I got a support email today that told me to "Fuck off" because of the ads in one of my free apps. The race to the bottom isn't a good thing for anyone.
Yes. Its called a competitive market - I don't know how you can seriously argue against such a thing in the modern world, where all of us rely on it (price competition) for basically everything we buy.
Though (perhaps thankfully, given the response to my post) the relatively simple nature of this means that its (if not now then soon) going to be a price-competitive industry anyway.
What I find most appealing about this post is his enthusiasm. It's rubbed off on me. I've been unproductive for the past 2 hours watching anime but suddenly I'm excited again.
This looks great! It seems to make Stripe simpler (since Stripe is essentially simple payments for developers, but non-developers have a hard time grasping all of their docs). If you don't plan on expanding it too much, you might try to talk to the Stripe team and have them integrate :)
Wow...you're sick. You can design, code front AND back end? Not to gush, but that's like a step above the 'unicorn' :O Now I have something to aim for :P
(I also took a peek at Lumo...wth man...is there anything you don't do!)
I am not defending a valueless response like that, but it is a bit crazy to imply that one person could build something the size of PayPal in five days.
The title is stupid, and titles matter. PayPal is PayPal not because you can send money based on email addresses but because it was the company that figured out how to do it in a way and at a time that won the market. Making a PayPal like website has little to do with why people know the name PayPal, or the company's significance. It's like setting up a toy online book store and saying "How I created Amazon in five days". It's meaningless and stupid. And sometimes things are so stupid they're not worth being "constructive" about.
* Set up a Twilio number for billing support. Play hold music even if your office is closed.
* Proxy transactions to Stripe using a intermediary server in India to match the latency and reliability.
* Randomly multiply totals by 10.
* Randomly forget to call the Stripe API.
* Setup auto renewals. Even for one time payments.
* If a customer has more than 20% in receipts than the previous day, freeze all funds for 190 days.