SubsCrypto

In prior hackathons I've developed products that seem like they could be commercializable, sold in a Software as a Service subscription model with multiple tiers of features/allowed usage. Using traditional web2 payments didn't seem appropriate for web3 projects and would have required a lot of legal overhead to make sure that incorporation documents were all properly in place before being able to present those to a traditional payment processor. This is not in the spirit of rapid prototyping that seeds entrepreneurship. It would be much better if one could set up to accept cryptocurrency for payment in the planned business model and at least test out the market. If it's a strong response that could even bootstrap the company to the point where it's much more attractive to outside investors (if the founders wish to take on such investment). Now, that's more possible and easy to achieve than it was.

Within less than a few minutes, a rapid prototyper/entrepreneur can get set up to receive payment and can have multiple subscription tiers for different feature sets or levels of use (and different prices). They can set up their own web page with advertising and prompt users to initiate the transaction without needing to visit any of this project’s web2 infrastructure, though the one from this project is also available as a backup. Even faster than that, a user can pick which tier they want to subscribe to and prepay for as much time as they want on that subscription. They can add to their balance and easily switch tiers up or down (or cancel out) at any time, and pay only for the time period they were subscribed.

The contract is live on multiple networks, and contains a lot more powerful functionality than just the highlights covered in our interface.

I built it using the Scaffold-ETH starter repository, which is a Next.JS project set up for blockchain Dapp development. This gave me working code to start with, and allowed small changes to each be made and tested to verify that things were still working as expected, producing rapid build-test-learn iterations that really make a difference in a hackathon.

In addition to a lot of competing time priorities, I ran into a few challenges along the way. One was that the Scaffold-ETH dependencies included an older version of the OpenZeppelin dependencies not compatible with the instructions in all the documentation I was looking at; upgrading that fixed the issue. Scaffold-ETH's automatic lint-checking that blocks commits got in the way a few times, as did Microsoft's default policies preventing script execution in the VSCode terminal. I also got held up for a while with challenges getting AWS Lambda functions to work correctly, for an earlier part of the idea. I also ran into a problem with a Next.JS dynamic route not properly passing a URL parameter through.