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Comment by halfjoking | Hacker News Reader

If this supported tons of payment gateways through their plugin system out of the box then it would be worth considering. But if you go to the page about payment gateways they don't have a listing of 50 integrations you could easily drop in. Instead they basically say you'll probably have to write the integration yourself:

https://docs.killbill.io/latest/userguide_payment.html

No thanks - I'll just use a payment processor that has a good API for subscription billing, and a flag on my users table that the subscription is up to date.

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FWIW the very vast majority of our users are integrated with either Adyen, Braintree, or Stripe (all open-source plugins).

I know of ~20 integrations with more advanced gateways/processors: these are closed-source plugins, but the overall community wouldn't benefit much from accessing them (e.g. it doesn't make sense for many companies to directly integrate with mastercard APIs).

As a software engineer who focus on developing payments and billing systems, I assure you that gateway integration is by far the easiest part.

At a basic level, yeah. It gets hairy when you dive into timeout handling and dealing with errors in reconciliation, across multiple gateways.

tl;dr: there is no easy part

They do have Stripe, Adyen, CoCardless [1]

I do agree this would be something a fully commercial project would/should focus on.

https://github.com/orgs/killbill/repositories

Great low effort dunk on an open source project. Go you

Yeah I was too negative. Vendor lock-in sucks so I'm glad someone is tackling it and I should have started with that.

But I think people shouldn't hold back criticism either just because something is free or open source. Stability AI (Stable Diffusion) just sold out and took $100 million from investors after being open source. Even if they're providing something altruistically now you never know if that will change after VC, buyout offer, or some other event.

But the open source code is still there, the community is always able to fork and continue development. True, that rarely happens, but does occasionally (e.g. Emby -> Jellyfin).

Yeah that's good sine the vendors get a lot of control for writing the basic API's. This is open source so they let you choose which means not getting everything spoon fed.

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