Self-Hosted Main

Working for a bank i know there many aspects that come with being a PSP. Think about fraud detection, KYC, technical as well as well as financial audits. When you work with card processing you need to abide with Mastercard policies for example(which is a few hundred page rulebook). Same goes for various other payment methods with each their own rules, fraud rate tresholds. Then there are security aspects, risk apetite, chargeback policies as well as possible liquidity requirements.

My 2 cents is that this is a bit much for a side project. But I don’t know how much time and resources you have on your hands. As there is a reason people usually use larger payment providers and smaller payment providers usually attract a certain type of customers(p*rn, gambling, “research” drugs etc)

If you want to do this solely for your own company, perhaps the way to go is to tie a few existing psp API’s together. But in Europe since the wirecard scandal regulators have become more strict on PSP’s.

Hope this info helps you a bit and doesn’t encourage you, if you are really set on this you’ll find a way. But handling other people their money and payment infrastructure comes with great responsibility.

The only easy way is to have customers transfer payment directly to your bank account. Other than that, dealing with credit cards, frauds, audits, chargebacks, etc... will be more than anyone can do as a "side project".

Lordy. That fact that you think this could be a side project is a huge red flag in and of itself. You can start out with SAQ D to get a little taste of what you’d be in for…

https://listings.pcisecuritystandards.org/documents/SAQ_D_v3_Merchant.pdf

I can probably develop a stripe clone by myself.

=)))))))))))))))))))

“Payments Systems in the U.S.“ is a book that is a decent introduction into everything involved.

Is this something you even have the power to do at your company? Often times larger companies will negotiate special contracts with stripe. If you do have the power, there are alternatives to Stripe with lower fees, but they aren’t as nice as stripe to work with.

I built a payment processor many years ago for a large bank.

Spoiler alert: you won't be self hosting something like this. The regulatory and compliance aspect alone will financially destroy you. You'd have audits, auditors in your home, and they will fail you. You won't be able to be in compliance and thus you won't be allowed to process financial transactions.

You will need an intermediary, like stripe or square or similar, to accept payment. Shop around for a solution or start investing into a large education on SEC, FDIC, and PCI regulations before you even get into the technical and physical challenges of financial transaction processing. I am guessing there are quite a few additional regulations now.

Good luck

Question - why do you think payment processors even exist? Why don't huge companies with tons of workforce just process payments themselves and save millions of $ on paying the processor fees?

The answer is all the legal trouble and complications. So many regulations, so many liabilities, so many issues with security that companies decide that it's worth spending a percentage of their multimillion-dollar revenue to not have to deal with.

And you are trying to do all that by yourself. This project is impossible.

Sure you can build a stripe clone, sure bud. I have Eng friends who work at Stripe. I don’t think you can even begin to understand what’s involved with a business like this. They ARE the gateway so have fun implementing “verified by visa” with 200 banks.

Btcpayserver. Credit cards etc just forget about self hosting, I worked for a credit card processor in the past, you won’t be able to get through the PCI audit.

There’s a reason stripe is a payment processor and your company is using it.

Regulations and costs alone make it difficult for companies, never mind individuals. Getting approval for things. Having protections, gaining trusts etc etc. the list is endless. It’s not something that an individual should ever be considering. Stripes fees aren’t too bad and they do the heavy lifting. You would spend way more thinking about setting up yourself and researching. The time cost involved. It’s just not worth it for anybody but the biggest players.

Wheres the cost/benefit justification? My company went through the certification process. It cost many thousands and took many months.

You still need it to go through a bank so you can't have it selfhosted.

The truly selfhosted way to accept payments is Bitcoin/crypto, it doesn't even require "hosting" anything.

As other probably said. Don't do it. Payment processing is not just setting up a server and a database. Just as implementing your own encryption protocol is a bad idea, creating your own paiement system sadly also is...