The Problem We Were Actually Solving
We shipped a binary diff tool named diffsweep in 2021. It saved engineering teams 40 percent of their CI minutes by only running tests that touched changed files. By mid-2023 we had 1,800 paying customers, most of them small engineering managers who expensed it on the company card. The total monthly revenue hovered around $18,000, enough to cover two part-time contractors and a modest cloud bill. The catch: every single one of those customers used Stripe, Gumroad, or PayPal. And my own bank—lets call it Bank of SanctionsLand—decided in August 2023 that receiving money from Stripe in USD was now a sanctions violation. Not because of anything I did, but because the OFAC list suddenly included the word software.
What We Tried First (And Why It Failed)
I tried Payhip first. Their onboarding flow looked like the easiest path: upload a license key file, set a price, and theyd handle VAT and payouts. Except when I entered my country code—and yes, I actually had to type it manually—the dropdown showed a grayed-out No supported payout method. Same with Gumroad: their API returned 422 Unsupported country on the payout endpoint. The third disaster was Stripe: their compliance bot flagged any payout to a bank in SanctionsLand as high-risk, even if the source was a US customer. I spent three weeks emailing their support, attaching KYC documents, and finally got a human reply: Let us know when you move your bank account to a supported jurisdiction.
