I cut my Stripe Connect fees from $9,400/mo to $5

Hi Indie Hackers,

I'm Ben / Tiny Projects (I once posted here about buying 300 emoji domains from Kazakhstan…).

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:

• GitHub: https://github.com/zonelessdev/zoneless
• Website + docs: https://zoneless.com

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 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.
• 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.

It's totally free to use. I'd love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or questions - especially if you've dealt with Stripe Connect / payouts / marketplaces before.

• GitHub: https://github.com/zonelessdev/zoneless
• Website: https://zoneless.com
• Docs: https://zoneless.com/docs