Today, I'm proud to announce the launch of our most-requested feature of all time: integrated invoices and payments!
It's now incredibly easy and fast for you to collect payments from your clients for all of your gun.io projects. You can now send detailed, itemized invoices for your work directly through gun.io, so your clients can pay directly into your bank account using their credit cards. We'll even automatically generate your 1099 tax forms if you collect more than $20,000 a year (which many gun.io developers are now.)
Here, Rick Ross illustrates how it feels to get that hack money in your bank account.
Getting Paid, Getting Paid
From day 1, it's been our primary mission to get more money and freedom to great open source hackers, so seeing that developers are getting cash straight into their bank accounts is an amazing feeling for us.
Having lived as a professional freelancer, I know how difficult it can be to actually get paid sometimes. Doing your own invoicing is awkward, dealing with cheques in the mail is a major worry and headache, PayPal is unreliable and wire transfers are even worse. Finally, those days are over.
Now, with just your routing and account numbers, you can be collecting payments into your bank account on the same business day! Awesome! (Note that your very first transfer may take a few extra days to verify your account - after that, payments are sent out every business day.)
Rick Ross's unit tests have passed.
The Hook Up
At gun.io, we're here to help you at every stage of your project, from writing your proposals, to getting the work done, to getting paid. If you're every having any problems with your applications, your work, or collecting payments, we're here to help you out. It's what we do, all day every day.
To use this new feature, just go to the new "Invoices" tab in your dashboard. From there, you'll be able to connect your bank account, create your invoices, and see the status of all your payments. To create your first invoice, simply click on the "Submit Invoice" button. If you've got multiple projects, you'll be asked to chose who to send your invoice to, but if you've only got one you'll be taken directly to the invoice creation page. From there, you can write your tasks and amounts just by clicking on them, and then pressing the Send Invoice button when you're finished. Your client will get an email with a link to the invoice along with a payment button.
Hackers on Gun.io can afford to eat as much cereal as they want.
Under the Hood
Behind the scenes, we're using the Stripe Connect API to handle all of the actual transfers. About two years ago, before Stripe Connect existed, I actually wrote a blog post here on gun.io about what a great OAuth-based peer-to-peer payments API would look like. Well, I don't know if the folks over at Stripe read the post or if great minds just think alike, but Stripe Connect is pretty much exactly what I was describing anyway. It was a breeze to integrate, the libraries are great, the documentation is solid and the support is wonderful. If you ever need to write some marketplace code, I'd strongly recommend using Stripe.
Future Plans
For now, gun.io invoicing is only for gigs that come through the gun.io system. However, if you've got your own pipeline but want want to use gun.io for your invoicing and payments, don't worry, we're thinking about you too. If this is something you'd be interested, shoot me an email so I can build it for you!
Hackers on gun.io made more than a million dollars last month from the great freelance opportunities here. If you're not getting your gigs through gun.io yet.. what's stopping you?
To everybody else.. Happy hacking!