tinyprojects

Zoneless is an open-source Stripe Connect alternative

Thanks! Zoneless was not affected by this

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback! It depends on if they make a sale, but we run a daily payout system currently on PB. We've not had any concerns from sellers regarding this, some prefer USDC because it is more stable than holding their own currency.

I've been banging my head against a wall the past few days trying to work out a solution to this. I've yet to make a decision, but my discoveries / theories so far:

- Stripe Atlas accounts are treated separately to regular US Stripe accounts at the moment when it comes to address verification. My Stripe Atlas account has passed this verification fine because of this difference (maybe because Stripe auto-uses the Delaware registered agent I paid for during Stripe Atlas setup as physical address?), but a regular Stripe US account using the same Earth Class Mail address fails verification. Stripe support says this: 'The address given to you on your Stripe Atlas account will be valid as it is provided by our partner, but then for normal Stripe account, one requirement is to have a physical business address.'

- I'm wondering if the Earth Class Mail address for my Regular Stripe US account is failing specifically because it has the words 'PMB XXXX' (private mailbox) in the first line of the address. This address was given to me at random by Earth Class Mail when I created my Stripe Atlas account, and I didn't really think anything of it - but I can see how 'PMB' is an instant red-flag for not being a physical location. The exact error message I get is: 'Invalid address. Your business address must be a valid physical address from which you conduct business and cannot be a private mailbox'.

- Also stumbled across the virtual office solution. Instead of PMB's they have 'suite numbers' in an actual building. I agree it also feels hacky, and likely to come under the same verification issues, but might a short term fix for my PMB issue. A lot of the services I contacted seem a bit shady though. I even emailed one of Stripe's partners (usestable.com) with a specific question regarding if their virtual addresses still work with Stripe, and have so far got no response.

- Co-working spaces like WeWork and Regus offer a virtual office service, which seem a bit more legitimate than some of the specific virtual office services I've seen, but come with a higher price-point.

I will probably try a cheap virtual office solution first, then move onto the co-working solution if that fails. I want to try and avoid switching Stripe accounts if possible as I think it's going to cause a lot of pain with migrating subscriptions etc.

The meta-issue here is the quality of Stripe support. I have paid so much to Stripe in transaction fees, but when a problem like this threatens to shut down an account I operate, all I get from them is vague answers, pointing to documentation, and 'computer says no' responses from people who have no idea what they're talking about.

Worth a shot if anyone can help me out / is facing the same problem.

I'm a US non-resident (from the UK) who registered a business via Stripe Atlas, and used Earth Class Mail (a Stripe Atlas partner) to setup and incorporate my company when I signed up to Stripe Atlas.

Due to the nature of my business, a large majority of payments are micro-transactions, so I spoke with a Stripe employee who kindly enabled micro-transaction pricing on my account.

Fast-forward to a few months ago, and I decide to offer a subscription service for my business at a higher price point. I was advised by a Stripe employee to set up a new Stripe account for these higher priced transactions as micro-transaction pricing wouldn't make sense, so I registered a new US Stripe account using the exact same business details as my Stripe Atlas account (using my Earth Class Mail address, EIN, etc.)

My original US Stripe Atlas account seems to have passed this new US verification fine - whereas my new US Stripe account is threatened to have payouts/payments disabled on March 12th unless I provide a physical US address, as it doesn't like the Earth Class Mail one.

I have contacted Stripe customer support who have not been helpful - if there's anyone at Stripe who can help me with this I would hugely, hugely appreciate some help.

I am facing this issue where I received an Earth Class Mail PMB XXXXX address when setting up my Stripe Atlas account and registering my business (I am a US non-resident), and now my account is being threatened to be shut down in 14 days if I don't get a new address. Is this a problem with Earth Class Mail addresses all being P.O box / virtual addresses? Or have I just gotten unlucky with the address I was dealt?

Much less - 99% of our transactions are < $20, so every time we get hit with a dispute it's already an instant loss in terms of the dispute fee cancelling out any revenue gained back from winning the dispute.

I've only trialled this system recently, but my current results are:

1 Win

2 Partial Wins (basically a loss with how much you get back)

3 Losses

All these payments were fraudulent (a user doing credit card testing) and disputed by foreign banks (Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil). I think these cases are much harder to win, because the actual card holder is technically in the right to request the money back on their stolen card for a transaction they didn't do.

Much better than my previous results of just accepting each dispute though :)

Sure! I basically use PDF Lib to generate a letter with all my evidence bundled into one pdf file. It sucks up data from my database about the user's activity. Format is the following:

Formal 1 page letter with company logo - "Dear Sir/Madam.. writing about $9.99 dispute for card XXXX on X date for user [NAME]" (all this is pulled from the Stripe API).

I then have 5 appendixes on separate pages:

Appendix 1: Users' receipt (just a pic of the Stripe receipt)

Appendix 2: User's order history (just printed, name of items, price, and timestamp)

Appendix 3: Screenshot of the user's purchases page clearly showing the item

Appendix 4: Email confirmations - I store copies of each HTML email sent, so just take a picture of this.

Appendix 5: Site activity with IP addresses and timestamps. This is all user actions on my site (viewing items, purchasing, etc.)

I created it because I had 20 disputes piling up, and I was dreading processing them all. Given that you're likely to lose the majority of disputes, it's super discouraging to put in the work, but this makes it a bit easier (I don't want to let fraudsters just get away with it!).

I was on Stripe Radar's free trial, but it wasn't as effective as I liked - it also turned out to be very pricey paying £0.04/screened transaction. I've now rolled my own combination of IP-based bans on creating checkout links + notifications if a purchase has many failed attempts using diff cards (you can do this for free through Stripe's API). I refund suspected fraudulent transactions religiously without question as the $20 dispute fee is crippling, and have systems that will auto-generate and submit evidence to banks whenever I receive a dispute. I wish Stripe would do more to help!

100% this.

I just used GPT-4 to help build an analytics dashboard using ChartJS. There's so many settings in ChartJS, it would have taken me a week to StackOverflow / Google how to get my charts how I'd like them - it took me a day with GPT-4. I could just ask it anything and it would help no problem. Any buggy code it produced, I'd just copy and paste the error message and it would provide a fix.

The day before I built a basic version of Stripe Radar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35323278

Coding with AI has made me more excited to build than ever before after 10+years of programming.

I really miss firebase function logs. Even though it was a bit glitchy at times, it was the perfect simplified overview of everything on my backend, and fitted well with the simple UI of firebase. I'm sure I'll get used to Google Cloud logs - but it just feels really out of place now.

Also noticing this - very hard to find software engineers in the UK right now. Apparently we have a major skill shortage[1] - which I'm not surprised by, given how little CS/coding was pushed in schools 5-10 years ago.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62098767

This is fantastic! Bluebird Sues Cat is a masterpiece.

This is really cool OP - did you create the list of prompts?

I'm working on Paper Website[1], which lets you turn a handwritten journal into a tiny daily blog. I've written nearly 150 posts[2] this way, and I think what's made me so consistent is having an "audience". It sounds weird, but there's ~200 email subscribers to my journal, and it's had nearly 200k page views. Knowing people are reading my stuff motivates me to keep going - I've tried regular journaling before and it just feels like I'm writing into the void.

I'm interested in your prompts because often people don't know what to write about - it's an awesome primer to start.

[1] https://paperwebsite.com [2] https://daily.tinyprojects.dev

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks WIRED has gone down hill a bit recently.

This is great! You've got something here

I write most of my blog posts using Sublime text directly into html code.

There's no spellchecker, it's annoying wrapping paragraphs in <p> tags, but my quality of writing is 10x better.

Something about my weird coder brain is way more comfortable doing my writing as code. I can also tell when a piece of writing is good, because the code looks "nice", the same as if you write a nice elegant function. It's weird to describe but I swear by it.

I tried writing using Google Docs, but my writing ended up being bloated and waffly, and the overall blog post was pretty meh.

Thank you for the kind words!

Hey HN!

I'm Ben, and for the past 18 months I've been building and launching tiny internet projects and documenting the whole process on my blog, Tiny Projects. Today I just launched my 7th project Paper Website.

Paper Website lets you start a tiny website from your notebook - just using pen and paper:

-Write your website/blog using pen & paper

-Take a photo of your page to turn it into a live website

Would love your feedback on this idea (& the landing page) What do you think of it?

Paper Website is also currently live on Product Hunt today. https://www.producthunt.com/posts/paper-website

Thanks for checking it out!

Thank you! I applied as soon as it was announced - I probably waited about 8 months before I eventually got access. Even after that, there's hoops you have to jump through before you can go live. It's incredibly cool tech to have on an API call.

Thanks so much for the feedback on this. There's a bit of a cost associated with paper to webpage conversions (and obviously hosting websites and images) - so I'm quite content with the current pricing.

You can try a Paper Website for 7 days for $1 here: https://paperwebsite.com/signup

Not yet - but I'm working on a tagging/markdown system for the exact reasons you described.

Part of the fun with building tiny projects like this is they're really low stakes. I build them as an mvp in a matter of weeks/months, launch them fast, then get a feel for if I enjoy running them. If I don't, I axe them, or end up selling them - (which is also a fun process).

This means I only really have a couple of things on the go at once, but I can try out way more ideas in a short period of time.

It's using a combination of OCR and GPT-3. GPT-3 is basically being used as a glorified grammar corrector, trained on bad OCR sentences and their correct equivalents. If there's spelling mistakes, crossing outs, or bad OCR going on, GPT-3 will pick it up and correct it into a coherent sentence. There's also a web-based editor that you can go into and edit everything afterwards.

Hey! I'm the creator of Paper Website. This is the seventh tiny project I've built over the past 18 months - I've been documenting the whole process on my blog: https://tinyprojects.dev

I built Paper Website because I wanted a quick and easy way to start a daily blog. I get distracted when I write on my laptop, but I love writing using pen and paper - so I set out to build this.

I'm obviously very biased, but there's something about writing blog posts using pen and paper that is extremely fun and liberating. It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts onto the internet straight from my pen - it reminds me of all the unfocused blogs of the good old days.

I'm also weirdly very consistent at writing now - I've been posting for 40 days straight using this method (here's my daily blog: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev). It's not for everyone, but I love it.

Thanks for submitting this - if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them!

If anyone is running into cold start problems on Firebase, I recently discovered you can add .runWith({minInstances: 1}) to your cloud functions.

It keeps 1 instance running at all times, and for the most part completely gets rid of cold starts. You have to pay a small cost each month (a few dollars), but its worth it on valuable functions that result in conversions, e.g. loading a Stripe checkout.

Oculus is also down

I've built a service that lets you create a micro-blog from a paper journal: https://paperwebsite.com/

It's given me great joy just publishing my unfiltered thoughts on the internet straight from my pen, which sounds similar to the "unfocused blogs" the author was talking about.

Perhaps in this highly edited, Instagram world we now live in - the raw, unedited nature of a blog is a bit more scary. I still love them though.

Here's my blog if you're interested: https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/