stripity_stripe VS gringotts

I think this needs a big qualifier. I feel the same way, when it's a project I'm capable of doing the work for. For example, I recently needed a way to deal with Stripe early fraud warnings and the library I used didn't have those yet, so I added them (this was all on my own time I should add)[1].

However, there are tons of dependencies that we use for all sorts of things that are highly complex where very few people would be able to send a PR (openssl for example). Things in highly complex codebases, or deeply unfamiliar languages, etc. I maintain a forked linux driver for a wireless card for example, and I don't expect there's more than a handful of people that could hack on it without introducing tears and devastation.

For the projects I maintain, I would just say, "if you can, please consider a PR. If you're not sure it would be accepted I'm happy to be asked! If you can't send a PR, give as much info as you can and be polite. With that we're good.

[1]: https://github.com/beam-community/stripity_stripe/pull/728

I recently had to create a subscription payment solution for Tolc, a C++ to other languages bindings compiler. During the process I wish I had a simple to follow, unassuming tutorial that I could follow. Since I couldn't find one, I wrote one myself! Even though I could use the excellent stripity_stripe, I still had to overcome some pitfalls.

I'm going to attempt to answer by way of links to active projects for you:

Stripe, including webhooks support, actively developed: https://github.com/code-corps/stripity_stripe

Global pay solution that supports everything: they are all a bit crap you're right, the best I've found is https://github.com/aviabird/gringotts and ex_money really is amazing that integrates with it (I would suggest it's better than the equivalent ruby gem). To be fair I'm not sure I'd want to use the pay gem with anything complex as you need to be able to use the specific quirks of each API properly.

You're also right about noticed, after looking into it more it would be worth building for elixir for sure. Ravenx represents a start but it's unmaintained and doesn't have a huge number of strategies. It depends on how much I needed to do notifications like this. For the apps that I've built we've just needed database and grouped emails sent once per day, no need for texts or slack etc. There's no reason these couldn't be added fairly simply but I agree noticed is very neat.

Thanks.

> Stripe, including webhooks support, actively developed

I've looked into Stripity Stripe. For some time it was unmaintained and ended up getting taken over by another maintainer. It's also not as comprehensive as the official Stripe libraries. There's also a very big difference in using an official Stripe library and hoping for the best with a random one someone developed. Just skimming the code base it looks like the Checkout module is missing features that exist in the official Stripe library in every other supported language.

According to the README file for Stripity Stripe it's also using Stripe's API version from 2019. There have been multiple major API updates since then, and there's been an open issue since November 2020 to add support for newer API versions with no replies. Personally I would be using one of those major features too.

And this really is the point I'm trying to drive home. With Ruby, Python, Go, PHP, Node, Java and .NET these are problems you don't even need to think about. You just pick the payment provider's official SDK and start coding immediately, often times there's also an abundance of resources to implement the billing code itself into your app too through blog posts, official docs, YouTube videos, and even paid products like https://spark.laravel.com/. Stuff that makes integrating billing into your app (through Stripe, BrainTree and Paddle) being something you get done in 1 day instead of 3 months.

With Elixir it becomes weeks of comprehensive research, evaluating questionable libraries, opening PRs, and becoming a full time library developer just to get to the point where you could even maybe begin to start accepting payments with just Stripe.

> the best I've found is https://github.com/aviabird/gringotts

I asked the Gringotts developers if they would be supporting PayPal about 5 hours after they announced the project ~3 years ago. He said it was coming and to stay tuned. It's now ~3 years later and PayPal support isn't there. Neither is BrainTree or Paddle. Here's the open issue for PayPal support from 2018 (not by me, I asked on another site) https://github.com/aviabird/gringotts/issues/114. The Stripe integration is also missing a ton and hasn't been touched since 2018.

By the way, the Pay gem is really good. It's a smart abstraction and supports a ton of different subscription / 1 off payment use cases. Even complex ones like the type of app I was building.

> It's definitely a few weeks work to roll your own from scratch so to be honest I'd probably just integrate with Twilio and just pay for someone else to handle this for me.

Twilio ends up being 1 potential delivery method, it's not really someone you pay to solve the problem for you.

There's wanting to show notification in the app over websockets, saving them into a database, emailing them out only if they are unread, maybe sending an SNS through Twilio, Slack and other providers.

The noticed gem handles all of this for you (and supports Twilio too).

Notifications in general is another example where other frameworks have this solved in very good ways, but it becomes another example where you have to stop developing your app and start developing a notification library with Elixir.

At this point we've only talked about payments and notifications too. There's lots of other examples.