DEV Community: SemTiOne

Heatmap Bot v1.2.0 - Automating Ko-fi Payments with Webhooks

SemTiOne — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:02:32 +0000

Quick update on Heatmap Bot - just shipped v1.2.0.

The main change: automated Ko-fi activation

Previously the payment flow was painful:

Customer pays on Ko-fi
I get an email notification
I manually run /grant in Discord
Customer waits

Now:

Customer pays on Ko-fi, includes their Discord Server ID in message
Ko-fi webhook fires
Bot parses the Server ID from the message
Paid tier activates instantly

The activation code system handles edge cases where they forget their Server ID.

Other changes

/announce command — lets me broadcast updates to subscribed servers
Feedback reference IDs (#A3F92B1C) for support tracking
Brute force protection on /activate — max 5 attempts/hour
HMAC verification on Ko-fi webhooks

Full bot: https://ko-fi.com/semtione

Invite Link: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1482225606761386085&permissions=2147601408&integration_type=0&scope=bot+applications.commands

How I Added Paid Tiers to My Discord Bot Without Stripe or Any Payment API

SemTiOne — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:46:18 +0000

Most tutorials for monetizing a Discord bot assume you'll integrate Stripe or LemonSqueezy directly into the bot.

I went a different route, manual grants via Ko-fi. Here's why and how.

The problem with payment APIs in bots

For a new bot with low volume, integrating a full payment API means:

Webhook endpoints to maintain
Subscription management logic
Refund handling
Failed payment handling

That's a lot of complexity for a bot that might have 10 paying customers at launch.

The Ko-fi manual grant approach

Instead, I set up Ko-fi as the payment page and handle grants manually:

Customer buys on Ko-fi
I get a notification
I run /grant guild_id:123456 days:30 in my admin server
Bot updates the database and unlocks paid features

python@app_commands.command(name="grant")
async def grant_paid(self, interaction, guild_id: str, days: int = 30):
    if not await is_bot_owner(interaction):
        return
    expires_at = int(time.time()) + (days * 86400)
    await upsert_subscription(self.db, guild_id=guild_id,
                               tier="paid", expires_at=expires_at)

When to upgrade to automated payments

Once you hit ~20-30 paying customers, the manual process gets tedious. That's when it makes sense to add Ko-fi webhooks (requires Ko-fi Gold) or switch to Stripe.

For now, manual is fine, and it means I talk to every single customer personally.

The result

Clean, simple, zero ongoing maintenance cost. Works well for early stage.

Invite Link: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1482225606761386085&permissions=2147601472&integration_type=0&scope=bot+applications.commands

Full bot: https://ko-fi.com/semtione

How I Built a Discord Activity Heatmap Bot with Python and discord.py

SemTiOne — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:40:35 +0000

I've been running a Discord server for a while and always wondered: "when is my community actually online?"

Discord doesn't show you this. You can see who's online right now, but there's no way to see patterns over time, no weekly view, no hourly breakdown, nothing.

So I built Heatmap Bot.

What it does

Heatmap Bot tracks your server's activity and turns it into a heatmap, a 7×24 grid showing activity by day and hour for the past week. It also supports:

Daily bar chart view
Monthly trend chart
Channel breakdown
Member leaderboard
Week-over-week comparison
Weekly auto-reports
Peak activity alerts
CSV data export

Tech stack

Python 3.13 with discord.py 2.x
SQLite with aiosqlite for async DB access
matplotlib + numpy for heatmap rendering
aiohttp for the webhook server
Railway for hosting
Ko-fi for payments (manual grant flow)

The interesting part, rendering heatmaps

The heatmap is a 7×24 numpy array. Each cell is the count of events at that day/hour combination, converted from UTC to the server's local timezone.

pythondef aggregate_to_heatmap_grid(events, timezone, days):
    grid = np.zeros((7, 24), dtype=float)
    tz = pytz.timezone(timezone)
    for event in events:
        ts = event.get("timestamp", 0)
        dt = datetime.fromtimestamp(ts, tz=tz)
        grid[dt.weekday()][dt.hour] += 1
    return grid

The rendering uses matplotlib with a custom blurple→pink gradient to match Discord's aesthetic.

The hard part - Railway + Discord rate limits

The trickiest issue was Discord's Cloudflare rate limiting. Too many reconnects from the same IP gets you a 1015 error, temporarily banned. The fix was switching Railway regions to get a new IP.

If you're deploying a Discord bot, make sure your restart policy doesn't cause rapid reconnect loops.

Free vs paid tier

Free: 7 days history, messages only, watermark
Paid ($4.99/month): 90 days, all event types, no watermark, leaderboard, CSV export

Try it

Add Heatmap Bot to your server: https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1482225606761386085&permissions=2147601472&integration_type=0&scope=bot+applications.commands

Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/semtione

Happy to answer questions about the implementation in the comments!

StandupBot – Generate daily standups from git history using Ollama or Groq

SemTiOne — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:11:32 +0000

Tired of trying to remember what you did yesterday for standup?

I built StandupBot, a CLI tool that reads your git history and generates a clean standup summary using a local or free cloud LLM. No paid APIs required.

Features

Private with Ollama (runs locally)
Free cloud option via Groq
One command: standup
Copy to clipboard: standup --copy
Health check: standup doctor

Quick Start

Install Ollama from https://ollama.com, then:

ollama pull llama3
pip install -e .
standup --setup
standup

Example Output

**Yesterday:** Fixed authentication bug and refactored token validation.
**Today:** Working on the new /users endpoint.
**Blockers:** None

🔗 https://github.com/SemTiOne/standup-bot

Feedback welcome!