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How does this work in terms of having a merchant bank? Surely you need something else besides this repo right?

Yes, while this is OSS, we haven't yet figured out how to self host an acquiring bank partnership... For now we're using Stripe Connect to set up a merchant account through our Stripe Connect platform. So as long as you are a legal entity (individual or business) in the countries that Stripe does merchant acquiring you should be good to go with us.

Eventually we want to get to a place where we are embedded deeper on the payments side. But for now that's the flow.

You still need to have a payment provider / merchant account, so that part remains the same

For all I could see this is no different than any other payment gateway service. Well, it is different in one important way: you'll pay a higher percentage per transaction, since the middle man needs to make money somehow.

With Flowglad you’d pay ever so slightly less than you would with a vanilla Stripe integration which usually includes Stripe Billing. That total cost is 3.6% (2.9% per charge + .7% for billing) and $.30, whereas we’re 3.55%.

We’re not really trying to compete on cost. But we certainly aren’t more expensive once you include the cost of Stripe Billing.

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