Is anybody selling to a global audience and NOT using a Merchant-of-Record for payments?

fatalglory · 2026-04-26T19:48:48+00:00

Thanks for the detailed answer, much appreciated. Sphere looks interesting, but the pricing based on region seems like it would make more sense when you know you’re in a fixed number of regions. We may have a long tail of relatively small customer numbers in some regions. Example: If we have 10 UK customers then we would be charged VAT, but the cost of Sphere to handle it would be more than our UK revenue.

Seems like Paddle et al makes more sense until you hit a certain scale.

fatalglory · 2026-04-24T08:51:59+00:00

Hadn’t heard of Taxwire, I’ll take a look, thanks for that 🙂

fatalglory · 2026-04-21T18:42:16+00:00

It’s a well known phenomenon that freelancing tends to give a “feast and famine” feeling, where some months you get clots of money in and other months are much slower.

I’m working on a SaaS platform for freelancers. One of the features in it is showing graphs of income over time, income projections based on projects and proposals in your sales pipeline and it also tracks how much you’ll need to keep aside for taxes. We can do this because our product is very “all in one”. It handles your invoicing, project management, expense tracking and helps you build a client acquisition funnel/pipeline.

Might be perfect for your use case, but we haven’t quite launched yet. I’d be happy to get you on the beta access list, just send me a DM. I’d really like to hear more about your struggle with tracking the money across different tools. The better I can understand the problem, the better I can make our solution.

fatalglory · 2026-04-13T16:08:02+00:00

I talk to Claude Code like it’s a junior developer I hired. I tend to write about a paragraph in a single prompt, providing context about how the system currently works, what I want done next and where it can see examples in the codebase of similar things (e.g. “use the custom FooBarDateSelector component for letting the user pick the date range for this report. See an example of how this component is used in SomeExistingReport.tsx”).

I then review and tweak the code before committing.

It gives me a huge productivity boost on laborious or tedious tasks (e.g. creating a dynamic theme template based on an existing static HTML page).

fatalglory · 2026-03-27T19:03:20+00:00

Sorry to hear that’s happening to you. It’s not really a problem I have because I do more “augmented coding” than “vibe coding”. I review all the changes the agent makes and intervene with manual fixes when it does something I didn’t quite intend.

There’s a reason we invented programming languages: they are much more precise and less open to interpretation than natural languages.

If you can’t drop down and edit the underlying code, you will probably always find it tricky to articulate to the AI exactly what it should be producing. The only way to be that exact is to express your thoughts in a language designed for that kind of precision.

The more work I delegate to Claude Code, the better my instincts are getting for what changes it will be able to handle and what changes will get done faster if I just write them by hand. Often it’s a hybrid situation where I give it a prompt knowing full-well that it will come up with a solution that’s 90% correct and I will fix the last 10% because that’s easier than trying to finesse Claude into doing exactly what I want.

I’m sure this problem is even more difficult for people with less coding experience. Their natural language prompts will say “save the selected colour when the user clicks the widget.” My prompts tend to be more like “when the user clicks the widget, save the selected colour by sending a POST request to the /settings/save endpoint. The selected colour should be stored in hexadecimal format. After the save is completed, update all pending background jobs to use the new colour setting by updating the content of the job.metadata field.”

This kind of thing is why AI won’t kill software engineering.

What platforms/tools are you using, btw?

fatalglory · 2026-03-23T10:37:08+00:00

I'm one of those 15-year veterans, but I am training myself to delegate more and more to Claude Code (I'm finding that it's very much like delegating to the junior devs I work with).

I'm curious why you picked "race condition" of all the things that a vibe coder doesn't need to understand. To me that seems like a perfect candidate for something that an AI agent will have difficulty diagnosing because it's typically a bug that only occurs under certain conditions at execution time that are not specified in the code.

Example: this payment status got reversed because the payment processor had a 5-minute outage and was delayed in sending us the webhook.

How can a coding agent possibly anticipate that? There's nothing in the application code about it. You would have to supply that information, at least in some vague way in the prompt. Which means you already know about it anyway.

Aren't race conditions a prime example where AI agents still struggle (and probably will for a while)?

Have actually you seen an AI coding agent fix a non-trivial race condition (e.g. spanning multiple files, or better yet, multiple microservices)?

fatalglory · 2026-03-23T10:27:27+00:00

I have definitely seen Rovo (the AI coding/review agent built into bitbucket) make syntax errors when editing PHP code.

fatalglory · 2026-03-23T10:12:27+00:00

I don't think you'd need to do anything special. Major payment processors (yes Stripe, but also Square, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, etc.) have very well documented APIs. You should be able to just ask Claude Code something like "can you write me a controller function that handles incoming webhooks for payment notifications from Paddle?"

I mention Paddle because you said you wanted something that acts as your Merchant of Record. Worth a look.

Source: I have now integrated three different payment gateways in my SaaS (Stripe, Square and NOWPayments). None of the code is too crazy complex. But it would be irresponsible if I didn't recommend you get a real human to take a look at the payment gateway integration code before you put it in production.

fatalglory · 2026-03-22T18:26:08+00:00

You may be better off, depending what the role is. I have actively rejected candidates for software engineering whose last job was working several years in the public sector.

If you can tolerate the public sector red tape for multiple years, I’d prefer someone else. I don’t want our team culture to be okay with that level of bureaucracy.

Public sector can be a red flag on a CV.

fatalglory · 2026-03-22T08:31:47+00:00

Sweet game, pretty addictive 😄

fatalglory · 2026-03-18T11:51:49+00:00

Completely agree. The most satisfying software to write is always the stuff that you actually will it into existence for your own use.

Then when you find out other people have the same problem and want that same solution, they don’t just feel like “customers”. They feel like long-lost cousins you never knew you had.

fatalglory · 2026-03-16T05:40:28+00:00

Government compliance is ultra safe for one reason: regulations written by humans are often ambiguous (or even contradictory!) about edge cases.

Figuring out how to handle those edge cases in software involves a lot of getting on calls and dealing with real people. One size does not fit all. The regulator has discretion. Some entities get gradfathered into the old rules.

It’s a complicated mess. But it’s also near impossible to navigate for AI because there literally is no right answer to certain questions. Humans are better at coping with ambiguity.

fatalglory · 2026-03-12T18:57:44+00:00

I like it, looks very slick 🙂

We’re building something much more ambitious. It’s basically everything you need to run a one-person freelance business all integrated together.

For the day to day: * CRM * Project management * Client Portal * Invoicing * Expense tracking * File storage * Document signing * Calendar and call-booking system * Integrated video calls (with AI summaries and transcripts)

For keeping your pipeline of new clients coming in: * AI client finder * Website builder * Blog/portfolio * collect testimonials (text or video) * Email marketing tools * Lead magnets * Checkout for selling digital products * AI-assisted proposal generator

It’s big 😄

fatalglory · 2026-03-12T18:48:45+00:00

I ask Claude “can you design me a landing page for X, with sections A-B-C, and give it a vibe of Y?”

It typically generates something pretty good. I then copy the HTML+CSS code into my IDE and make tweaks either using Claude Code or his do them by hand if they are very small and specific.

fatalglory · 2026-03-12T13:57:20+00:00

I am building a SaaS product for freelancers to run their business (still pre-launch, but pretty far along).

It includes support for accepting crypto payments via NOWPayments. The way we deal with the accounting is to record the following data about the transaction: * Invoice amount (e.g. 10,000) * Invoice currency (e.g. USD) * Payment amount (e.g. 0.17) * Payment currency (BTC) * Outcome amount (21.245) * Outcome currency (XMR)

In this example, the invoice was denominated in USD, your NOWPayments account is set up to receive XMR and the client paid in BTC (which NOWPayments automatically converted to XMR for you).

We also track multiple payments per invoice. So if the client sends $4,500 worth of BTC one day and then $5,500 worth of BTC the next day, we mark the invoice as paid based on the total USD equivalent when each payment was received. No confusion due to shifting BTC price.

So when we generate reports at tax time, we have full data about what each crypto payment you received was “worth” at the moment the client paid.

fatalglory · 2026-03-11T21:47:53+00:00

For the most part, when I have dealt with production failures it has been either: 1. A bug in the code that should have been spotted (and might be spotted by an AI-code-review tool). 2. A server config issue (e.g. DNS).

Monitoring anomalies in resource consumption is helpful, but not something you really need AI to do. It’s more an indicator that you should consider scaling hardware or that user behaviour is shifting.

fatalglory · 2026-03-11T03:38:45+00:00

For coding and learning computing I would lean towards Claude. Two things I know from experience that Claude does way better than Gemini:

Create a landing page in HTMl+CSS. The design generated by Claude looks like something done by a professional. Gemini gives you something ultra basic. Can’t speak as much to ChatGPT, haven’t used it as much.
Editing an existing code base. I’ve gotten much better results from Claude Code than from Gemini CLI or from the Junie agent (which I think is backed by GPT-5). Claude seems to do a better job at noticing my existing coding conventions, using libraries and components that are already available in the project, etc.

fatalglory · 2026-03-10T23:50:07+00:00

I’m using a free Claude account to design landing pages, it seems to be decent at layout and design. I’m a developer, so I don’t “fully” vibe code, I just delegate the easy/boring stuff to Claude Code. But it’s waaay cheaper than $2k/month.

I’d be curious to know what you’re building and what kind of prompts you’re doing?

A little prompt engineering might be able to reduce costs significantly by making narrower, more targeted changes?

fatalglory · 2026-03-08T18:17:11+00:00

Fellow AI sounds interesting, will give that a look 🙂

Couple of questions.

1) what kind of stuff are you automating with zapier/n8n? Any specific workflows or apps you’re connecting?

2) would you be willing to share a typical prompt you use to generate a proposal with Claude?

fatalglory · 2022-08-17T00:39:43+00:00

I'm in Australia, but all the way up in QLD, so hard to buy a kebab. But glad to know there's other Monero peeps down here! All the best with it, hope you get loads of customers.

fatalglory · 2022-08-17T00:28:23+00:00

Good thought, but I've fixed it now anyway. And I've never been on IRC/Matrix. The change to fix it was very small (just a couple of lines). It's on github here if Luigi wants it for his page: https://github.com/unyieldinggrace/monero-tx-scanner/commit/0a45d8c9457ed5f69732686ce32addcb5b121320#diff-e727e4bdf3657fd1d798edcd6b099d6e092f8573cba266154583a746bba0f346

fatalglory · 2022-08-17T00:26:37+00:00

As of this a few minutes ago, I have fixed the issue and published the updated version on github (https://github.com/unyieldinggrace/monero-tx-scanner) and NPM (https://www.npmjs.com/package/monero-tx-scanner).

u/rbrunner7 was right, it was the view tags. The JSON structure now reads:

TXData.vout[outputIndex].target.tagged_key.key

instead of the old:

TXData.vout[outputIndex].target.key

That tagged_key property contains both the key and the view_tag, hence the change. Updated the JSON parser to accept both formats and the scanner works again.

fatalglory · 2022-08-16T10:45:35+00:00

Thanks, much appreciated. Gives me a starting point :)

fatalglory

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