Autrans got its first international payment this week. Without Stripe...
I posted it on LinkedIn and the comments turned into a serious interrogation "How? Does Paystack take dollars? What if the rate moves?"
So I wrote the full breakdown 👇a thread...
I had a problem with collecting international payments for Autrans.
Stripe wasn't working for me, so I had to think around the problem.
I already use Paystack, so I built a simple currency/pricing layer on top of it.
If you're in Nigeria, Autrans shows you the price in NGN.
If you're outside Nigeria, you see USD.
For example, Standard plans in:
Nigeria: ₦8,000
International: $8
The interesting part is what happens underneath.
Paystack still processes the payment in NGN, so I created a subscription plan using the naira equivalent of the $8 baseline.
The user sees and thinks in dollars, but the payment infrastructure settles against my NGN pricing baseline.
So I basically separated the pricing layer from the payment layer.
Using Geolocation → localized price → currency conversion → Paystack checkout → subscription.
It's not the traditional international payment setup, but it solves the actual problem without waiting for Stripe to magically cooperate.
And today, someone outside Nigeria made the first international payment on Autrans.
Small win, but this one made me smile. 😂