CashNotify for Stellar

bastienpetit

Hi, Stellar community!

We’re Julien and Bastien from CashNotify, the app for monitoring Stripe payments from your menu bar. We launched it in June 2017 and have a community of enthusiastic entrepreneurs as our customers.

Our project for the Stellar Build Challenge is to make CashNotify compatible with Stellar accounts. Within the same app, merchants will be able to monitor their Stripe and Stellar accounts.

The Stellar accounts feature is in public beta, sign up on cashnotify.com/stellar/ to try it!

Why are we building this?

We believe in new payment methods for online merchants. We love Stripe but it has some disadvantages, mainly:

Only available for merchants in 25 countries
High fees
Very few alternatives to paying by credit card

We think that we’re going to see more and more merchants accepting cryptocurrencies in the near future. And they will want to monitor payments from their menu bar!

Why Stellar?

We’ve been blown away by the quality of the documentation, the API’s design, and the tools for developers. The Stellar platform make us happy to write code. We believe in its mass adoption potential.

Progress

January 29: Start prototyping
February 12: Post this first message on the forum
March 8: Update this post's illustration with a preview of our "CashNotify for Stellar" marketing
March 9: Sign up page for our private beta is live at cashnotify.com/stellar/
March 13: Send a private beta to our first users
March 23: Now in public beta, enter your email to receive a download link immediately

Do you want to try it?

CashNotify was created by listening to our customers. Many features wouldn’t exist without their input. We want to keep building this way and we’d love to hear your opinion on the app as we build it.

Thanks for reading and good luck with what you’re building today!

(This original post was edited as we progressed)

tyvdh

Oh my gosh yes please! This would be amazing! Be sure and ping me if you need any help or have any questions.

julienma

Hey Tyler — Julien here, the other half of CashNotify.
Glad to see your enthusiasm ?

For now we're trying to understand the main Stellar concepts, so we'll probably have some questions about that.
Also, what would help us most right now is having feedbacks from people already accepting Stellar to sell products online. This would help us understand the use-cases specific to using Stellar, so we can try to make CashNotify useful while keeping things simple.

Do you yourself use Stellar to actually buy/sell stuff?

tyvdh

julienma Hey, yes I'm both a Stellar developer and user. I don't buy "much" with Stellar atm and it will likely be awhile before that becomes super common but having a notification system in place for activity on an account will be ace. Especially with the many various assets which will be coming online over the next year. It will be less about keeping track of the value coming in and out or what your balance is and more monitoring the activity of assets moving around.

A big feature for me, and it may have to be a v2, will be keeping track of pending offers in the DEX.

I'm @tyler on Slack and @tyvdh on Twitter. I've built several fully featured Stellar apps so I'm more than happy to help.

rbates

julienma Hi Julien! You and Bastien have built a really nice looking product. Love the design and product messaging. It's awesome that you all are looking at Stellar now too.

RE: polling and displaying data transaction data. I agree with tyvdh, you could link to a transaction explorer such as stellar.expert (excellent site as well), but to keep things simple it might be better to get what you need from a horizon endpoint for storage and display. You can poll for it, or your can use server side events (SSE) to "listen" for transactions. It all boils down to tradeoffs in latency and complexity. If you get really big you can run a validator, and from what I understand you can just hit the underlying tables directly with SQL - but that's probably overkill for now.

If you all need help with testing or any other technical or product assistance please feel free to reach out. I launched a Lumens only shop last week (http://stellar.shop) as a way to experiment with the platform and learn more about the needs and opportunities in the ecosystem. More than happy to share with you my experiences and help in any way I can.

bastienpetit

Thanks Tyler, appreciated!

I do have one question: Where would you link to for a payment details? I started with StellarChain.io but their pages have a gambling ad, so I'm considering StellarExpert instead. Which explorer do you like the most?

CashNotify payment details links

bkolobara

bastienpetit https://stellar.expert is my favorite. It's developed by @OrbitLens: https://galactictalk.org/d/532-stellarexpert-explorer-ledger-explorer-and-analytics-platform

There is also: https://steexp.com/

tyvdh

bastienpetit Yeah stellar.expert is pretty good but honestly just linking to the raw JSON is what I would do. Or just build your own. The problem right now is so many apps are coming up and dying out right now or getting "hacked" that it's just not super wise to rely on third parties too much yet. It'd be a super easy endpoint to build and host yourself, but really I'd just link to the transaction JSON from a horizon endpoint.

Also fwiw I'm building a GraphQL endpoint for my SBC entry which may interest you as you wrestle with getting the data you need for this app using Horizon alone. https://galactictalk.org/d/885-graphql-interface-for-core-and-horizon-databases/4

bastienpetit

We've been polishing the UX for adding Stellar accounts, here is a preview:

Adding a Stellar account on CashNotify

Newly added features:

The notion of Test/Live network. With Stripe, API keys in test or live "mode" use the same endpoints.
The account label edition. With Stripe, we could get the account's name from the API.

Next step: open the landing page and invite people, starting with @tyvdh and @rbates ?

rbates

bastienpetit Next step: open the landing page and invite people, starting with @tyvdh and @rbates ?

Right on, can't wait to check it out. Just to clarify, the new version is not on the site yet correct?

RobertoCavani

Is it open source ?

bastienpetit

Hi RobertoCavani ,

No, it's not open-source. Julien and I left our jobs to start a business as independent developers. CashNotify is our first app, and we're working on it full time.

We hope to reach tartiflette-profitability soon. It's the same as ramen-profitability, but with potatoes + cheese + bacon ?

CrptoCraze

bastienpetit It's a shame it wont be open source.. It's key to respect the four freedoms. See: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html..

BlockMaster

This will be a useful app in my opinion. How many upgrades do you once you purchase it?

bastienpetit

Thanks BlockMaster !

When you buy the app, the updates are free for the lifetime of the current version (currently V2). As you see here, we don't change versions often: https://cashnotify.com/updates/

The Stellar accounts feature may be part of a new version (V3), because we have several other "large" and still-not-announced new features that could justify it. We're still working on these features + their marketing.

If we do have a change of pricing/version, we'll make sure that customers who bought the app just before the change don't have any reason to be disappointed.

julienma

BlockMaster And yeah, we do release frequent updates, up to few times per month ? — see our Changelog.

dzham

CrptoCraze

People are free to write their own software

julienma

Oh, btw, we need your help:
You can already choose in which currency you want to display the dashboard. That's especially useful when you have multiple accounts in different currencies.
This will also be useful to convert Stellar to fiat currencies, so you can get an idea of how much your XLM are worth.

So:

We already get real-time XLM rates from https://apiv2.bitcoinaverage.com/,
However, XLM is not available in their historical rates.

Question: Do you know of any XLM historical rates provider? Huge preference for a JSON API, and if it's free it's even better. Something exactly like this (https://apiv2.bitcoinaverage.com/#historical-data), but with historical data for XLM!

Thanks!

bastienpetit

Hi rbates Awesome! Our sign up page is now live at cashnotify.com/stellar/, please register and we'll be in touch by email.

Yes, the new Stellar accounts feature is in private beta for now, on invitation only:

bastienpetit

Collecting more opinions on a UI topic: Which one do you prefer?

Decimals

Option 1: Display all decimals for XLM, like many wallets and exchanges do. Transactions often show lots of zeros.

Option 2: Round XLM amounts at 2 decimals. Precise amount is available in the event details.

tyvdh

bastienpetit show everything. As XLM increases in value it will become increasingly important. You could round to the nearest non zero number to save space I guess.