A recurring payment platform for window cleaners powered by Stripe Connect - no longer active.
Technologies
Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL HTML, Bulma CSS, Stripe, Heroku
Idea
I kept missing my Window Cleaner and felt bad about not being in when he came to collect his fee. After speaking to him and a few other window cleaners I decided to build an easy to use platform where they could pass cards through their customers letter boxes and have them set up recurring payments online.
The goal was to start with this MVP functionality and then grow the site to include a booking platform, route management platform, and various other features.
Challenges
Initially I tried building this using WordPress but the functionality just wasn't there. This is when I got serious and decided to really learn web development so I could build it myself.
This was my first real coding project so I had to really get to grips with HTML and CSS, learn the basics of Javascript, learn SQL/PostgreSQL syntax and design patterns, use my new Ruby on Rails knowledge, and get to grips with the MVC pattern.
I also needed to figure out which payment platform to use, I tried multiple subscription based providers but none of the off the shelf products had the functionality I was looking for.
Solutions
After giving up on WordPress I set to work really getting to grips with Ruby on Rails and how to architect a web app. I mostly used resources available online, udemy, and had a few codementor.io sessions when I got stuck.
For the payment platform I opted to use Stripe as by using their stripe connect platform I could allow windowcleaners to create an account with stripe, have it linked to my platform through OAuth2, create all the subscription products on their stripe accounts, and then when customers paid on the website I could add a small fee for processing and pass the cleaner their intended amount of payment.
To implement this I needed to sync the database with stripe, and utilise web workers to carry out the heavy lifting of creating the stripe entries.