I’m a founder and recently had a payout from a major payment platform delayed without much warning. The delay directly affected my ability to cover infrastructure costs, even though the money had already been earned. That experience was frustrating and made me question how much control builders really have over their own cash flow.
This got me thinking: instead of relying entirely on black-box gateways that pool funds and control payout timing, would builders want a self-hosted payments setup where money goes directly to their bank account using instant bank rails like UPI, SEPA Instant, or FPS? Not as a replacement for cards or Stripe, but as a way to avoid opaque payout holds where instant settlement is already possible.
Before building anything, I wanted to ask: is this something you’d personally use, or are payout delays simply an unavoidable cost of doing business online? I’d really appreciate hearing real experiences and honest opinions.
salawat•1h ago
You could make a self-hostable solution, but the rest of the financial network would basically either refuse to accept your packets without sufficient proof of regulatory compliance in order to preserve their own good standing with regulators. It's a pretty jealously guarded sector, because it sorta has to be to make fiscal crime tractable.
I mean... Go for it if you want. Just be aware, your resulting impl cannot be legally employed without a money transmitter license.
alexmccain6•1h ago
The angle I’m exploring isn’t to bypass regulation, but whether a non-custodial, self-hosted orchestration layer can exist that never holds funds and only works on rails that already support direct settlement. The model is closer to paying a shop directly than paying through an intermediary....the software is never a counterparty, never pools funds, and the regulated entities remain the banks or processors on both ends.
In a US scenario, the idea would be that the merchant runs the software themselves, and onboarding doesn’t abstract compliance away but explicitly guides them through what they need in place to legally accept payments, linking out to the appropriate providers and only working once those are set up. My question is whether, in your view, that meaningfully changes the regulatory posture, or if simply being part of the payment initiation path still makes MSB treatment unavoidable.
Appreciate you calling this out....it’s exactly the constraint I’m trying to understand.