On Today's Agenda
- Hitting the Limits of AI Tooling
- The Core Question: Stripe vs. RevenueCat
- The Verdict & A Local Twist
- An Indie Developer's Philosophy in the AI Era
Hitting the Limits of AI Tooling
Wow! A guide to making money with AI in 2025? 🤩
Not quite. This is a deep dive into payment gateways and how to integrate them into the website I've built with AI so I can actually start selling.
After getting a relatively complete interface, coded 100% by AI with a ton of prompts, I went through the loop of testing, committing, deploying... over and over. I started to find Bolt AI becoming extremely sluggish, with bugs that I just couldn't fix. It seems it only works well for simple landing pages. The moment I got to the Dashboard screens, Bolt ran into a lot of issues: fixing one thing would break another, fixing that would cause a new page error, fixing the new error would bring back the original bug... So, it's best to just use it to "farm" UIs for quantity during its one-month trial (from the hackathon). The internal logic will probably require Windsurf and Cursor.
On the bright side, reviving old projects with a new interface is something it does in a snap. I had saved some old web designs that I loved but whose sites are now defunct. I found them on the Internet Archive, took screenshots, and had Bolt bring them back to life. Just like that, I had a one-of-a-kind website.
The Core Question: Stripe vs. RevenueCat
Back to payment gateways. RevenueCat requires using Stripe or a Merchant of Record (MoR) with integrated billing, like Paddle. Paddle is great because it handles VAT and is a solution when you can't register for Stripe with a Vietnamese legal entity. In terms of fees, Stripe is cheaper, but the key requirement is having a legal entity in a supported country like the US or UK.
This raises the question: if I can get Stripe, why do I even need RevenueCat?
This is the crucial distinction. I had AI create a comparison table to break it down, but here's the summary:
- Stripe solves the problem of "getting paid" on the web. It's the payment processor that handles the transaction.
- RevenueCat (RC) solves the problem of "what has the customer bought, and what should the app unlock?" It manages the subscription lifecycle, provides analytics, and syncs purchases across multiple platforms.
In short, Stripe handles the cash; RevenueCat handles the customer's subscription status and entitlements. It's the management and growth tool that sits on top of your payment processor.
The Verdict & A Local Twist
If your product has (or will have) a mobile app, if you want to A/B test paywalls, or if you simply want to save on maintenance time, RC is definitely worth keeping alongside Stripe.
The main reason for me is integrating payments on the App itself. Customers will buy through Apple/Google, and RC helps sync that user data, allowing them to buy once and use anywhere. For this reason, I'm willing to pay the extra 1% fee to RC for now and consider cost-saving measures later.
One more note: if my customers are primarily from Vietnam (>80%), I will redirect them to 9Pay. Using a local Vietnamese payment gateway will save quite a bit on fees.
An Indie Developer's Philosophy in the AI Era
Since the app is in its early development stage, I desperately need users to use it, give feedback, and request new features.
For indie developers like me, the greatest joy is creating products that have real users.
So many products get thrown away. The code can be beautiful, the technology can be fancy, you can even register a company in some far-off land to dodge taxes... but the product has... no users. :D
With the current wave of AI, creating new products has never been so fast—it's like making instant noodles.
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