Comment by amelius
4 days ago
It's probably because "we built our castle inside Stripe's kingdom" doesn't sound very cool.
However, if enough people start using this then they might become the new gatekeepers because they could swap Stripe for any other payment processor without the need of the user knowing.
Their website says fully opensource and since it’s a Stripe wrapper, this seems to be an opensource alternative to Stripe Elements. It does require a Flowgrad account and key so it will provide value if other payment processors started using it.
Is there any benefit to using Flowgrad’s react components and hooks over Stripe elements directly?
I thought the whole post was about the benefits, namely that Stripe has too many webhooks and doesn’t handle enough of the tax computation.
Did I misunderstand something? Or is this about a different angle?
Ah that is another benefit, using Stripe Elements and Stripe directly, you have to save the subscription ID and other fields in your database. Flowgrad seems to handle this on their side.
The benefit is that our hooks get entitlement data directly to your frontend. Stripe Elements just focus on payments forms. But what about how payments state impacts what features or usage credits you grant? Stripe doesn’t handle that; they leave that as a concern for your business logic to figure out. The result is glue code you need to write to keep your application database up to date with the ground truth in your processor. Usually through brittle, messy webhooks code.
With Flowglad’s hooks and server SDK, we get that data to your frontend and backend. So you can read it from us wherever you need it.
>However, if enough people start using this then they might become the new gatekeepers
Stripe would likely change their ToS and then revoke their API keys before they could get anywhere near that level of dominance.