First post in 4 years I’ve been busy bootstrapping PromptBase to 450k+ users But I was burning $9,400/mo in opaque Stripe fees for seller payouts So today I’m launching Zoneless: an open-source clone of Stripe Connect using USDC Identical API, except payouts cost $0.002 I’ve been dogfooding it on PromptBase for 3 months: - 2,200+ sellers onboarded - 1,400+ payouts completed - $9.4k/mo in Stripe fees → ~$5/mo - 73% of sellers chose Zoneless over Stripe

A few nights ago I instructed an AI agent to ship one secret feature to PromptBase at 4am and deploy it whilst I was asleep - it just had to benefit the site in some way. I wanted to see what this felt like - which sounds really weird - I know. It decided to ship a feature that alerts users before their account is about to get timed out from too many declined submissions - a pretty useful idea based on a lot of emails from support. It went well, and worked! - waking up and seeing it felt very cool. It was a bit like the AI equivalent of one of those trust experiments where you fall back and someone has to catch you (thankfully I was caught)

I completely missed the OpenClaw hype - I actually thought it looked kind of dumb at the time. But the past week or so I've been quite enjoying using Grok Bot - which is very similar (and like OpenAI dots I guess). I have a support bot that uses my Gmail to answer emails, an engineer bot that writes code, and a security bot that monitors my Cloudflare and server logs for suspicious things. I’m super intrigued by this as a solo founder/developer as a way to run a "big" looking company from the outside as just one person.

thank you Ben!

£10 from Google Domains

Woke up to 100+ stars on the repo, thank you for the support! ⭐️ I've never built open-source before, so this is all pretty new Back to building now 🫡

thanks Robert!

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mainly through great timing with the AI boom, SEO, and a few reddit hacks.

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yes, bit of a hiatus from posting!

It was a surprising result! We are an AI marketplace so probably a big crossover AI x crypto users, but the main incentive was that sellers can get their sale funds faster - which is a big motivator to push through & use it.

No, it operates entirely on Solana / USDC as a replacement for Stripe Connect payouts.

Thanks Ryan! PromptBase might be a bit skewed as AI x Crypto has some crossover, but we've definitely found that sellers have a big interest in using it and will push through if it means faster access to funds + payouts.

Good to be back, Rich!

Thanks for the feedback Yassine, I 100% agree on the pay-in side its going to be a while before cards are not the #1 choice. Zoneless is just for the payout-side currently - you can definitely use it alongside Stripe! (we do this on PB)

thanks David!

thank you!

thanks steven!