DEV Community: Michael Stanat

Free online event on October 14: Embed Payments into Your Platform or Marketplace

Michael Stanat — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 18:51:06 +0000

Sharing a free online event for anyone exploring or building an app, service, software product, platform, marketplace, or new business idea. On Wednesday, October 14 from 7:00 to 8:00 PM ET, we are hosting Build with Stripe Community: Embed Payments into Your Platform or Marketplace with the Stripe Community. It is a 60-minute, discussion-led workshop with a payment-mapping activity and an optional live Stripe Connect demonstration. It is open to everyone: founders and aspiring founders, product managers, designers, developers, creators, operators, and students. You do not need payments expertise, technical expertise, a company, or a finished product. You can join here: https://www.stripecommunity.com/public/clubs/stablecoins/events/build-with-stripe-community-embed-payments-into-your-platform-or-marketplace-bcbvqc5xp5 . Bring an idea, an early build, a product you admire, or just a question.

Embed Payments Into Your Platform or Marketplace: What Changes When You Own the Money Flow

Michael Stanat — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:58:16 +0000

Most software products reach a point where payments stop being a feature and start being the business. A scheduling tool starts paying the cleaners. A marketplace starts splitting each sale between a seller and the house. A vertical SaaS app starts moving money on behalf of thousands of small businesses. The moment you route other people's money, you are no longer just a piece of software. You are part of the financial plumbing.

This post is a plain walk through what embedding payments really involves, what it changes about your product, and where builders get stuck. It is written for anyone building a platform or marketplace, with no assumption that you have shipped payments before.

Why platforms embed payments in the first place

There are three honest reasons to bring payments inside your product rather than sending users off to a third party.

The first is economics. When you own the money flow, you can take a share of each transaction. That share compounds as your users grow, and it often becomes larger and more durable than your subscription revenue.

The second is experience. Every time a user leaves your product to pay someone else, you lose control of the moment that matters most. Embedded payments keep the buyer, the seller, and the money inside one flow that you design.

The third is data. When the payment happens inside your platform, you see the full picture: who paid, who got paid, what failed, and why. That visibility is what lets you build payouts, reporting, financing, and trust features later.

The core concept: you are running a mini payments network

The mental shift is this. In a normal checkout, money moves from a customer to you. In a platform, money moves from a customer, through you, and out to a third party, minus your cut. You are now responsible for three parties instead of one, and for the rules that govern how money splits between them.

That is the model behind tools like Stripe Connect. You onboard your sellers or service providers as connected accounts. You collect the payment from the buyer. You decide how much goes to the seller and how much stays with you. The platform handles the payout, the tax forms, and the compliance checks that would otherwise take a team of specialists.

The hard part is not the single happy-path transaction. The hard part is everything around it: onboarding a seller who has never been vetted, holding funds when something looks wrong, refunding a buyer without clawing back money the seller already spent, and proving to a regulator that you know who is on your platform.

Where builders actually get stuck

Onboarding is the first wall. Before a seller can receive money, they have to be verified. That means collecting identity and business details, running checks, and handling the cases that fail. Teams underestimate how much product design this takes, because a blocked seller is a seller who cannot earn.

Money movement is the second wall. Splitting a payment sounds simple until you add refunds, disputes, partial captures, and multi-party orders. Each of these has a correct sequence, and getting the sequence wrong means money ends up in the wrong place.

Testing is the third wall. Payments code is the code you least want to discover is broken in production. The teams that ship confidently are the ones that rehearse the full flow, including the failures, before a single real dollar moves. This is where a command line tool that lets you trigger and replay payment events locally earns its keep. You can fire a simulated dispute, watch your webhook handle it, and fix the logic before a customer ever sees it.

A sensible order of operations

Start by writing down the money flow in one plain sentence: who pays, who receives, and what you keep. Almost every later decision falls out of that sentence.

Next, model your parties. Decide what a seller account looks like in your system and what has to be true before it can receive money.

Then build the collection and the split as one flow, and test it against the failure cases, not just the success case. Trigger the refund. Trigger the dispute. Trigger the declined card. Make sure your product does the right thing each time.

Only after that flow is solid should you add the features that make the money flow valuable: payouts on a schedule, clear reporting for both sides, and the trust signals that keep buyers and sellers coming back.

Where this is heading

Payments is also where some of the most interesting recent change is happening. Stablecoins are pushing settlement toward something closer to instant and global, which matters most for platforms that pay out across borders. You do not need to adopt any of that on day one, but it is worth understanding where the rails are moving, because the platforms that own the money flow are the ones positioned to use the new rails first.

Go deeper, live and free

We're hosting a free online session on this exact topic. On Wednesday, October 14 from 7:00 to 8:00 PM ET, we're running Build with Stripe Community: Embed Payments into Your Platform or Marketplace. It is a 60-minute, discussion-led workshop with a payment-mapping activity and an optional live Stripe Connect demonstration. It is open to everyone: founders and aspiring founders, product managers and designers, developers, creators, operators, and students, and anyone exploring an app, service, software product, platform, marketplace, or new business idea. You do not need payments expertise, technical expertise, a company, or a finished product, and you do not need to operate a platform today. Bring an idea, an early build, a product you admire, or just a question.

You can register here: https://www.stripecommunity.com/public/clubs/stablecoins/events/build-with-stripe-community-embed-payments-into-your-platform-or-marketplace-bcbvqc5xp5

Whether you are building something now or just exploring an idea, come with your questions.

Free online event, October 14: Embed Payments into Your Platform or Marketplace

Michael Stanat — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 01:36:35 +0000

We are hosting a free online session on Wednesday, October 14 from 7:00 to 8:00 PM ET, and everyone is welcome. There are no prerequisites and nothing to prepare.

What we will cover

It is a 60-minute, discussion-led workshop. Together we map who pays, who provides the product or service, what role your product or platform plays, whether the platform earns a fee, and when and how the business receives its money. We will look at how Stripe Connect can support onboarding, payments, fees, and payouts, with an optional live demonstration.

Details

When: Wednesday, October 14, 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM ET
Where: Online
Cost: Free
Who: Open to everyone, including founders and aspiring founders, product managers, designers, developers, creators, operators, and students. No payments expertise, technical expertise, company, or finished product required.

Register

Register here: https://www.stripecommunity.com/public/clubs/stablecoins/events/build-with-stripe-community-embed-payments-into-your-platform-or-marketplace-bcbvqc5xp5

An RSVP alone does not register you. Please complete your registration at the link to receive the join details.

Free online event tonight for anyone building with AI, September 16 at 7 PM ET

Michael Stanat — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:11:18 +0000

Sharing a free online event for anyone building with AI. Tonight, Wednesday September 16 at 7:00 PM ET, I am hosting Ship a Working AI-Powered App in 90 Minutes with the Stripe Community. It is open to everyone, with no prerequisites and nothing to prepare. You can join here: https://luma.com/888hdpbv. Hope to see some of you there.

Free online hackathon: Build with Stripe Community, Sept 16

Michael Stanat — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:41:29 +0000

Bring an idea and start building it live with AI.

Build with Stripe Community is a free 90-minute online session: a short talk followed by a hands-on hackathon. You will see how AI is changing the way apps get built, get an intro to Stripe Projects for managing your tech stack with AI agents, and build a real project from the terminal using AI coding tools.

Open to everyone. No prior experience and no finished app required.

When: September 16, 2026, 7:00 PM ET, online
Cost: Free

Register on the Stripe Community page:
https://www.stripecommunity.com/public/clubs/stablecoins/events/build-with-stripe-community-simplify-building-your-tech-stack-with-ai-oyakk9raah

Before You Build Stablecoin Payments: 5 Questions That Shape the Architecture

Michael Stanat — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 03:11:02 +0000

As I’ve been learning from developers building stablecoin payment systems, one pattern keeps appearing: moving money is only one part of the job.

The harder questions involve custody, refunds, reconciliation, permissions, and support.

Stripe’s current stablecoin payment documentation offers a concrete example. A customer can pay from a crypto wallet using a supported token and network, the completed payment can settle into the business’s Stripe balance in USD, and a refund goes back to the customer’s original wallet as stablecoins.

That is one checkout, but three different money experiences.

Here are five questions I’m using to understand the architectural choices.

1. What job is the stablecoin actually doing?

“Accept crypto” is not a use case.

Are you trying to:

let international customers pay with assets they already hold?
pay sellers or contractors across borders?
shorten treasury settlement times?
support machine-to-machine payments?
reduce friction for a specific customer segment?

Each answer implies a different architecture.

A hosted checkout that converts into a fiat balance is different from receiving stablecoins into a treasury wallet. A marketplace payout flow is different from an API that charges an agent per request.

Start with the job, not the token.

2. Who holds the asset, and what do they receive?

Map the full path of funds:

customer → payment provider → platform → seller or business

At each step, ask:

Who has custody?
Which asset do they hold?
On which network?
When is conversion performed?
Who pays network and conversion costs?
Who manages keys if a wallet is involved?

A business that wants stablecoin acceptance but prefers USD accounting may choose a different flow from a platform whose sellers explicitly want onchain settlement.

“Paid with a stablecoin” does not necessarily mean “the business keeps a stablecoin.”

3. What happens when the happy path fails?

Blockchain finality does not eliminate customer support. It changes the failure modes.

Design for:

duplicate payment attempts
delayed confirmation
wrong-network transfers
refunds and partial refunds
expired sessions
webhook retries
underpayments or overpayments
reconciliation between onchain records and your internal ledger

Your payment handler should be idempotent. Your team should know which system is authoritative for payment status. Support staff need a clear way to find a transaction without asking a customer to understand a block explorer.

Transaction finality and dispute resolution are also different concepts. A transfer can be final while the underlying commercial disagreement remains unresolved.

4. What authority does an AI agent actually have?

Agentic payments make this question urgent.

An agent that can spend money needs a policy layer, not simply a wallet balance. At minimum, consider:

maximum amount per transaction
daily or task-level budgets
approved merchants or service categories
credential expiration
revocation
human approval thresholds
receipts and audit trails

Stripe’s agentic-commerce documentation describes Shared Payment Tokens as scoped to a single transaction and time-limited. Stripe and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol also supports stablecoin and fiat payment patterns for agents.

The useful design principle is broader than any one protocol: give software the minimum authority required to complete a specific job.

5. Can operations explain every movement of money?

A payment integration is not finished when the demo succeeds.

For every transaction, your system should be able to answer:

What did the customer intend to buy?
Which token and network were used?
What amount was authorized and received?
What fees or conversions occurred?
Which internal order, invoice, or seller does it belong to?
Was it refunded?
Which webhook events were processed?
Can finance reconcile it without engineering help?

Stablecoins can shorten settlement. They do not remove the need for a ledger, monitoring, alerts, and clear ownership of exceptions.

A practical pre-launch checklist

Before enabling a stablecoin payment flow, verify that you have:

a specific customer or operational use case
documented custody and conversion points
idempotent payment and webhook handlers
tested refund and cancellation paths
transaction-level reconciliation
limits and revocation for automated actors
support runbooks for failed or delayed payments
a clear fallback when a wallet or network is unavailable

The takeaway

The strongest stablecoin products will not make customers think about chains, gas, or settlement mechanics. They will make a difficult money movement feel like a reliable product flow.

The question is not only, “Can we move value faster?”

It is, “Can we make the whole system safer, understandable, and operable when something goes wrong?”

What would you add to this checklist?

I’m Michael, a community builder focused on payments, stablecoins, and agentic commerce. I’m learning in public and connecting builders through Stripe’s Stablecoins Community.