Launched this week
Zoneless
Open-source Stripe Connect alternative with $0.002 fees
68 followers
Open-source Stripe Connect alternative with $0.002 fees
68 followers
Zoneless is a free, open-source drop-in replacement for Stripe Connect using USDC. Identical API, but payouts cost $0.002 and settle instantly across 220+ countries. Battle-tested for 3 months on PromptBase, processing 1,400+ payouts and cutting my $9,400/mo Stripe fees to ~$5. If you know how to use Stripe, you already know Zoneless.
Zoneless
Hi Product Hunt 👋 excited to be launching on the first Alpha day! ⍺
I'm Ben / Tiny Projects,
For the past 3 years I've been solo bootstrapping PromptBase, an AI marketplace with 450k+ users. At the peak, I was burning $9,400/month in opaque Stripe Connect fees for seller payouts, so I built Zoneless to replace it.
Zoneless is a free, open-source (Apache 2.0) drop-in replacement for the payout part of Stripe Connect. It allows you to pay marketplace sellers globally with stablecoins (USDC) using an identical API to Stripe and at near-zero fees.
I've been dogfooding Zoneless on PromptBase for 3 months with some good results:
- 2,200+ sellers onboarded
- 1,400+ payouts completed
- Monthly payout fees reduced from ~$9.4k to just a few dollars
- 73% of sellers, when given the choice at onboarding, actively picked Zoneless over Stripe Connect
A massive part of running a marketplace is paying sellers. While Stripe Connect is a great product, it has big pain points:
- Expensive + complex fees: $2/mo per active account, 0.25% + $0.25 domestic payout fee, $1.50 international payout fee, 0.25–1.25% cross-border fee, 0.50–1% FX fee. It costs >$2 to move $1.
- Limited reach: Only supports around 47 countries.
- Slow payouts: Takes 2-7 days to settle.
- Platform risk: A massive single point of failure if your account gets randomly flagged.
Zoneless is designed to solve all this:
- Payouts cost ~$0.002 on Solana
- Global: 220+ countries/regions
- Instant payouts, 24/7/365.
- Self-hostable and open-source
The API/SDK is identical to Stripe (same webhook events, same object shapes, etc.). If you know Stripe, you already know how to use Zoneless. There’s also an Express Dashboard for sellers to onboard and track their earnings.
I've been able to remove annoying things on PromptBase like forcing sellers to accrue a $30 minimum balance before a payout just to keep our costs down. I can now also onboard sellers from more countries, which has helped spread the word and grow the buyer side too.
A big worry was that non-crypto users would be confused or hate getting paid in USDC, but they actually don’t mind at all, they just care about being paid faster. If they want to convert to their local currency, they simply use an exchange like Coinbase.
Zoneless is self-custodial, meaning you create and own your wallet, and the code never touches funds. You can also easily plug in providers for KYC/AML.
I appreciate that anything related to crypto is like Marmite (pretty polarizing); I’m a no-coiner and have never dabbled in NFTs, but I do think stablecoins are different: they’re just boring tech to move money around cheaply.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or questions - especially if you've dealt with Stripe Connect / payouts / marketplaces before.
- Website: https://zoneless.com
- GitHub: https://github.com/zonelessdev/z...
- Docs: https://zoneless.com/docs
@tinyprojects Hi. $0.002 fees sound crazy low 🤔 any hidden limits or catches?
Zoneless
@julia_zakharova2 Hi Julia! $0.002 is the average transaction fee to process a transaction on the Solana blockchain, no hidden limits or catches! other than its in USDC instead of USD.
@tinyprojects so far everything is clear 🤝
ProdShort
This is so interesting, but something is missing to understand it properly.
Does it need some integrations to work properly for payment and payout?
Or everyone should have an USDC account?
Zoneless
@bengeekly Thanks for checking out the launch! Zoneless is a self-hosted API - so you download the code and interact with it via http or an sdk: https://zoneless.com/docs - it's only for payouts currently, and sellers will need a wallet to receive payouts (which they are guided through during the onboarding flow).
Considering this for Leo.casa where we do escrow for home renovations, but I have concerns about security since we'd be holding thousands of Euros €€€ and needs it to be trustworthy. What are your thoughts on this?
Zoneless
@peter_neyra Thanks for checking it out Peter! Leo looks great - it would be a perfect use-case. The code is entirely open source for this reason, you can view & audit it and it can be scrutinised by others. Trust is a big thing. We also run it ourselves on PromptBase.