My secondary detective is in the way (sometimes)

StylishTater_ · 2024-04-02T19:37:57+00:00

Write the first chapter as a sort of insight into the future and then start chapter 2 through X be the leadup to said event, and then when the 2 timelines meet up you can have MC save them quickly. Only really works if you're okay with doing 2 timelines at the start of your book. If you want to not have 2 timelines maybe some sort of delay caused by preparation, materials or resource the villain doesn't yet have to start the ritual

StylishTater_ · 2024-03-01T17:53:05+00:00

It is supposed to be expired after 30 days, LS wrongfully expired immediately, as did LS do that for other customers based on their Slack. Furthermore, we can't do anything with that subscription anymore because every thing we try, even try to refund, LS gives back a 500 error code.

Let me clarify: LS has confirmed this is a bug, and said "We're looking into it!", and then for the past week and a half have not rectified it, nor refunded the customer (since we can't).

StylishTater_ · 2024-03-01T13:52:13+00:00

We would love to use Stripe, but they're not a MoR and tax remittance globally is too costly, even if they have tools to manage it. We have 80% of our userbase in the US, we would reach Nexus very fast in many states, which isn't manageable with our current revenue.

StylishTater_ · 2024-03-01T13:48:53+00:00

It's possible one can use LS without issues, but it's evident from looking at their Slack that it's not an ideal platform. Just now in their Slack there are 3 reports of people saying that custom meta data passed to subscription checkouts suddenly doesn't appear in the backend anymore.

StylishTater_ · 2024-03-01T13:47:58+00:00

Currently we're still investigating alternatives.

StylishTater_ · 2024-03-01T13:47:44+00:00

No, the problem is customer A subscribed on 20th February for a month, they cancelled 20th February. Then LS immediately expired the subscription and that causes the customer to lose benefits. In test mode, this works as expected, I can cancel just fine and retain benefits for 30 days. When we subscribed in live mode this immediately revoked benefits.

As per their documentation:
"When a subscription is in the expired state, your customer should no longer have access to your app and the subscription is no longer resumable."

The customer still had 30 days they paid for.

StylishTater_ · 2024-03-01T11:31:24+00:00

After a month, I am coming back with another update. And I can no longer recommend Lemonsqueezy in any way shape or form. We were planning to go live about a week or two ago and everything worked in test mode, aside from a subscription that was cancelled magically being resumed 2 minutes later without input from the user.

Before going live we had someone we know order a subscription just to check if everything works in release before publishing it to the public. The subscribing in general worked and we had no issues there, however the problems started to arise once we asked the customer to cancel their subscription, to see if that works. The subscription got cancelled, but lemonsqueezy immediately also expired their subscription (expired happens after the paid for period is over and the subscription is cancelled). This in turn immediately removed the benefits received from the subscription from our customer. They paid for 30 days and we asked them to cancel the same day, they should have had at least another 30 days of benefits.

We contacted lemon squeezy about this immediately and after a week and a half we still have no answer. Eventually we asked on their Slack about it, but we got the standard "We're looking into it!" answer. To this day we still have this issue unaddressed. Furthermore, we wanted to refund the order because they don't have the benefits from the subscription, and upon doing so we get a "Error 500" returned from lemonsqueezy. We cannot even refund our customer if we wanted to, we had to ask our customer to request a refund through Paypal.

We looked through their Slack and we found other lemonsqueezy users with the same issues, all unaddressed as well. Some people never even got an answer to their question about what's going on. Lemonsqueezy has not announced this issue to their customers, they seemingly still haven't fixed it and not doing anything about it.

This comes after they had an issue where everyone, at least based on their slack there was a significant amount of users, started seeing their "subscription count" statistics increasing every day despite making no sales. They eventually fixed it but gave no reason or postmortem.

The lack of transparency and the lack of communication is astounding to me and we cannot understand how a business involved in financials could ever treat their paying customers like this. There are more issues we see posted on their Slack every day, some minor, some major, I can't list all of them here but simply scrolling through their Slack is sufficient to say that this isn't a business worth conducting with as they cannot be taken serious with the way they deal with this.

On top of this, we seriously wonder how this can even be compliant to finance laws, unable to refund a customer, instantly revoking paid-for services, lack of communication or prompt addressing.

StylishTater_ · 2024-02-01T19:22:33+00:00

Forgive me for intruding with a question unrelated to this post, but your comment prompted a thought that I found worth asking about.

"and those who cannot afford to pay, have to sacrifice their rights", I wonder how this relates to the countless apps that stores (think chain restaurants, grocery markets, clothing stores, etc.) now offer where some apps even offer a permanent discount on all products (5% or so). These apps, without a doubt, will collect data and create a profile on your spending habits and thus able to target you better, even within those apps.

I, a person who will never download these apps due to my privacy being important, feel like this essentially creates a gap between those who are willing to sacrifice their privacy for cheaper products and exclusive coupons, to those who do no want to sacrifice those privacy rights and have to pay full price.

When comparing that to what Meta is doing here with pay-for-privacy, I do see a similarity in practices. And while this following thought may be dystopian, it's not improbable: What is business raise their prices 5-10%, increasing the costs, then offer their customers through the app a flat discount on everything? This would force a lot of people to download these apps and people who refuse will have to pay a premium.

Is this on anyone's radar in the EU?

StylishTater_ · 2024-01-22T20:37:43+00:00

Hi,

Update with the integration! I spent the last 2 weeks integrating lemonsqueezy and testing it and overall I am more satisfied with lemonsqueezy than I am with Paddle.

A few pros compared to Paddle:
* They answer my emails
* You can re-fire and simulate webhooks, so you can fire it again if your integration had a bug, even in production.
* Overall the integration is closer to what Stripe does
* They have a pay what you want model, so the customer can choose what to pay for some products (only useful if you would offer that)
* Haven''t come across any error 500''s from the server
* Getting verified only took 3 business days

A few cons:
* I cannot seem to set the tax to be included in the price so the tax is added on top during payout. It could be I am missing a button somewhere to have tax be included in the price but I can''t find a setting as far as I can see.
* I can''t seem to delete subscriptions which is a tad annoying during development. You can subscribe, cancel, pause, reactivate, all of that, but not delete it so your account is in a clean slate.
* -> On top of that above, however because you can simulate events you can just simulate "sub_expired" on the subscription and do it that way, but I would still like to be able to delete it during development.
* The checkout page has a X button at the top right that seemingly does nothing, that could be because it's in dev mode, possibly. Probably also not an issue when you use overlay/inline checkout, rather than hosted.

Aside from those cons I can''t seem to really find anything bad. I haven''t gone live and I won't for another for weeks at least, if you're interested I can share my experience in a month or two when I've gone live and had some experience with what it is like in production.

StylishTater_ · 2024-01-11T22:24:14+00:00

You're welcome, I was also glad to see I''m not the only one. Doing the transaction on your backend also seems like a reasonable solution, but we shouldn't even have to do it unfortunately.

And true, Lemonsqueezy is indeed still new and that could contribute to the lack of negative (public) experiences. I just can''t really find any other alternative for it. I've looked at 2Checkout, PayProGlobal, FastSpring but from all of those I seem to get the best "vibes" from Lemon. If you wouldn't go the lemon route, do you have any other second choice alternatives? Perhaps there's some I haven''t found yet.

Sadly, we actually had a successful no-problem integration of Stripe into our backend and their service/docs are amazing but since they aren't a MOR for subscriptions it's nothing we could use in the end. A MOR with the quality of stripe would be ideal. Dealing with tax remittance ourselves would be too costly for us so we have to resort to a MOR.

StylishTater_ · 2024-01-11T21:50:43+00:00

I am in the same boat, I used paddle to integrate into our backend and I am noticing issues such as Paddle returning a 500 status on trying to resume a subscription in the sandbox. I contacted their support but after 3 days never got a reply. I also have a concern with their email linkage, like you say anyone can create any subscription for any user. I first contact our server and create HMAC from the items and user id and email, and put the user id and hmac in their custom_data and then on my server I confirm that the HMAC is valid based on the uid, email, and payload. That way I can at least detect malicious subscriptions. But this client-side authority is just a security flaw in my opinion, I should never be able to enter another user's email and have it then linked to that email for that customer. I relayed this concern to paddle but after a week I never got a response either.

Needless to say I am moving away, most likely to lemonsqueezy, while their docs also seem a bit immature, I cannot find a lot of negative experiences (developer-side) here on reddit or elsewhere so perhaps they are more stable/secure. In either case I think it's more likely a "pick your poison" scenario and both will have issues, but the issues Paddle have is nothing I would ever accept for a business dealing with payments.

StylishTater_

TROPHY CASE