The 14 pains of building your own billing system

Re:The 14 pains of building your own billing system by jes5199 on Monday February 26, 2024 @10:10PM (#39519718)

I’ve spent the last 12 years doing payments-and-billing-focused engineering for various companies. Most engineers, in fact, do not want to do this work. It’s like specializing in plumbing for septic tanks, most people have an innate sense of revulsion of self-protection that keeps them from doing it. You screw up the money pipes, and you have a Real Problem.

However! The problems are interesting, the challenges are endless, and it’s possible in some orgs to get recognized as the person who is keeping the money flowing.

I do have a sense of frustration that every company seems to start off with a bad design for billing, so I’m always cleaning up after negligence… but it pays the bills.

Sometimes I think I want to build an open-source billing engine. To show off what it looks like if you do it right. But would that be killing the golden goose? Currently there’s endless demand from people who don’t know.

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Re:The 14 pains of building your own billing system by 6510 on Wednesday March 06, 2024 @03:48AM (#39613756)

My vision just now was to create a sand box with a DSL (that doesn't use floats) and have others write the rules into it.

   VAT.include(country, type, amount){
     if(type == "high" && country == "NL"){
       return percentageOf(price, VAT.NL.high) + amount;
     }
     throw new Error("Error in VAT.include: VAT not found."); 
   }

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