Hi Product Hunt 👋 Excited to launch on the first alpha day! ⍺
I am bean / small projects,
For the past 3 years I’ve been solo bootstrapping PromptBase, an AI marketplace with 450k+ users. At the top, I was on fire $9,400/month In the obscure Stripe Connect fee to pay the seller, so I made Zoneless to change it.
Zoneless is a free, open source (Apache 2.0) drop-in replacement for the paid portion of Stripe Connect. It allows you to pay with stablecoins (USDC) to marketplace sellers globally using the same API as Stripe and at near-zero fees.
I’ve been dogfooding Zoneless on PromptBase for 3 months with some good results:
– 2,200+ In the seller’s ship
– 1,400+ Payment completed
– Reduced monthly payment fees. Just a few dollars from ~$9.4k
– 73% of sellerswhen given the choice on onboarding, actively selected Zoneless on Stripe Connect.
A big part of running a marketplace is paying sellers. While Stripe Connect is a great product, it has major pain points:
– Expensive + Complicated Fees: $2/month per active account, 0.25% + $0.25 domestic payment fee, $1.50 international payment fee, 0.25–1.25% cross-border fee, 0.50–1% FX fee. It costs >$2 to transfer $1.
– Limited access: only supports 47 countries.
– Slow payment: takes 2-7 days to settle.
– Platform risk: A huge point of failure if your account is randomly flagged.
Zoneless is designed to solve all of these:
– Cost of payment ~$0.002 On Solana
– Global: 220+ Countries/Regions
– Immediate payments24/7/365.
– Self-hosted and open source
The API/SDK is similar to Strip. (same webhook events, same object shapes, etc.). If you know Stripe, you already know how to use Zoneless. There is also an express dashboard for sellers to track their earnings.
I’ve been able to remove annoying things at PromptBase like forcing sellers to deposit a minimum balance of $30 before payment just to keep my costs down. I can now also bring sellers on board from more countries, which has helped spread the word and drive more buyers.
A big worry was that non-crypto users would be confused or hate paying in USDC, but they don’t really mind, they just care about getting paid faster. If they want to convert to their local currency, they simply use an exchange like Coinbase.
Zoneless is self-custodial, meaning you create and own your own wallet, and the code never touches the funds. You can also easily plug in providers for KYC/AML.
I appreciate that anything crypto-related is like Marmite (pretty polarizing); I’m a noncoiner and have never dabbled in NFTs, but I think stablecoins are different: they’re just boring technology to move money cheaply.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or questions – especially if you’ve dealt with Stripe Connect / Payments / Marketplaces before.
– Website: https://zoneless.com
– GitHub: https://github.com/zonelessdev/z…
– Documents: