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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.
Discussion (17 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also the pricing is not very clear - you mention your costs went down to $6, but the first paid tier is $99/month ?
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.
so take normal cards then pay out in USDC....is that safe?
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.
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
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.