Selling ChatGPT Plus to people who can't pay OpenAI — 3 bugs that cost me money

Most people in mainland China can't pay OpenAI directly. No international card, no overseas billing address. The whole workaround market is manual — you message a seller on WeChat and wait for them to wake up.

I built [GetPlus](https://www.getplus.ai/) to turn that into a 3-minute self-checkout: pick a plan, pay in CNY through Stripe (Alipay / WeChat Pay), get an activation code in 3-5 minutes, 24/7, no human involved.

Here are three bugs that actually cost me money.

1. My daily revenue report was under-reporting by roughly 7x

The orders table stores an amount column with no currency column next to it. That was fine while everything was priced in CNY. Then I started charging some products in USD, and the daily summary just added the numbers together — $30 and ¥30 became "60". Revenue looked flat for days while it was actually growing.

The fix was boring: every aggregation now converts USD rows before summing. The lesson wasn't. A money column without a currency column isn't a shortcut, it's a landmine with a delay fuse.

2. An ad landing page showed USD prices with a ¥ sign

Same root cause, much worse blast radius. After the currency switch, one landing page still rendered "$20" as "¥20" — advertising a 7x discount that I would have had to honour. Caught it before ad spend ramped up, but only because I happened to look at the page.

3. Chinese characters silently vanished from printed receipts

Business customers need receipts they can expense, so there's a print view. The print stylesheet used PingFang SC, the default Chinese font on macOS. It renders perfectly on screen. But macOS won't embed it into a print-to-PDF, so every Chinese character just disappeared from the output.

You cannot catch this by looking at the page. You cannot catch this in a screenshot test. The only way to see it is to actually print to PDF and open the file.

Stack: Next.js 15 (App Router), Neon Postgres with plain SQL and no ORM, Stripe webhooks driving fulfilment, deployed on Vercel.

Happy to answer anything about building for a market that can't use normal payment rails.