Figure out the best way to take membership payments

[ahdinosaur]

In some ways, using something like Stripe would be great, since it's all handled in software, and we could make a membership portal, etc. But at the same time, those darn payment fees.

Am curious if there's a good way to handle automatic payments. We want new members to setup an automatic payment with a given reference. But we want things to be as easy as possible for the treasurer, ideally everything can be handled in software too.

[irab]

I could stand up a MedusaJS stack with subscriptions enabled? Working on a Open Banking plugin with Blinkpay that should be about 1/4 of the Stripe fees. But may not be ready by November?

[ahdinosaur]

I could stand up a MedusaJS stack with subscriptions enabled?

@irab i'm not sure this would be any easier than using Stripe directly? if i used Stripe directly, i'd just copy the code in https://github.com/vercel/nextjs-subscription-payments.

but i'm leaning towards automatic payments, and using a human to manage the accounts every month or something (with help from accounting software like Xero). means less software for right now, but at the same time could still have a "become a member" flow on the website: https://github.com/ahdinosaur/whack.nz/issues/5

[irab]

My comment was more on the "those darn payment fees" part than anything else. I'm a big fan of simple so Stripe is usually the way to go.

[ahdinosaur]

My comment was more on the "those darn payment fees" part than anything else.

I'm confused then, I thought Medusa was a layer above Stripe? I had a play with Medusa earlier for Village Kit stuff, decided was easier to just use Stripe and write custom code.

[irab]

Was just thinking that I'm working on a Blinkpay Open Banking API integration, thought I might have something ready to go that was cheaper than Stripe.

[ahdinosaur]

Ohhh I see, gotcha.