Three lines of code. A creator's income stream.

The problem we were actually solving

When we started building Seedr, we thought the hard part would be the payments infrastructure. Stripe Connect, PCI compliance, FCA roadmapping for 2028. Those things are hard. But the real blocker, we discovered, was the friction between intention and action. A fan wants to support a creator. A creator wants to accept that support. But if you make either of them jump through hoops, the moment dies.

So we built SeedrButton not as a feature, but as the fastest possible path between desire and completion. Three lines of code in Swift or Kotlin. That's it. No API keys to manage in seventeen different places. No modal dialogs to configure. No authentication layer that makes a creator's fans feel like they're applying for a mortgage.

When a fan taps that button, they send money directly through Stripe Connect. They don't create an account. They don't save a card. They just tip. A minimum of £5, or five Seeds in the terminology that stuck with us from day one. If they come back next week and tip again, it's the same frictionless path.

Why we made it stupidly simple

Complexity sounds like diligence. It feels professional. Every payment system we looked at had dense documentation, multi-step implementations, developer ceremonies. We initially thought that was the cost of doing this properly.

But then we watched Streamr broadcasters, Giggl comedians, Foundr makers, and faith creators try to use other tipping solutions. They'd get halfway through setup, hit a wall, and give up. Meanwhile, their audiences were ready to send money. The infrastructure existed. The will existed. Only the ease didn't.

Three lines of code became our North Star. If a creator's developer couldn't add a tip button in under five minutes, we'd designed it wrong. And if we needed more than three lines of actual code to make it work, we hadn't thought hard enough about what could be abstracted away.

That philosophy shaped everything else. SeedrButton talks to a single Supabase backend. Your creator profile lives at seedr.app/@handle. Your analytics and weekly Monday payouts flow to the same dashboard. One source of truth, not a patchwork of integrations and webhooks that break when someone's not looking.

The money lands on Monday

One of the earliest decisions we got wrong was weekly payouts. It sounds efficient from a reconciliation standpoint. But for a creator living month to month, waiting until Friday to find out what they earned on Tuesday is torture.

So we moved to Monday payouts. Every Monday, creators see what landed that week. Tips come in throughout the week; money hits their account on Monday morning. It's not instantaneous, but it's predictable. And predictability is what creators actually need.

The fees are transparent. Five percent for standalone creators. One point five percent if you're on Foundr Free. One percent if you're Foundr Pro. No surprise clauses. No tier changes that reset the maths mid-month. The logic lives in one place in our codebase, supabase/functions/_shared/fees.ts. That's not infrastructure talk for its own sake; it's a guarantee. One source of truth means no accidental double-charging, no edge cases where the creator sees one fee and we see another.

There's also a £20 minimum payout threshold. Below that, your tips sit in the account until next week tips push the total across the line. Practically, that means a creator earning £15 this week will see that £15 land next week when they get another £10. It's not a trick; it's just the math of payment rails and banking costs.

Building for faith creators from day one

Our strongest beachhead has always been faith communities. Church members tipping pastors and worship leaders. Christian content makers supporting their work through their audiences. Faith creators taught us something important: they didn't want Patreon. They didn't want monthly subscriptions. They wanted to send money on a Sunday morning after a great sermon, or after a Wednesday night youth meeting when the conversation hit different.

That micro-tip model is what Seedr is. Not recurring billing. Not membership tiers. Just tip, send, and move on. An audience that feels moved supports a creator right then. No standing order, no commitment, no guilt if they miss a month.

That simplicity matters even more in faith spaces because the relationship is about generosity in the moment, not economic lock-in. A pastor teaching about giving needs the infrastructure to just... let their congregation give. Not with a form, not with friction, just with a button and a choice.

The roadmap sits on FCA ground

We're not FCA-authorised yet. We run on Stripe Connect, which is. That's Phase 1 of our roadmap. By 2028, we plan to reach Payment Institution authorisation, and Seedr will handle settlement directly. We built toward that day from the start.

Every transaction uses integer pence. No floating point nonsense. No rounding errors. All our schema decisions, our audit trails, our fee structures, are already written to pass an FCA audit. When we flip the switch in Phase 3, the backend doesn't change; we just get the authorisation to operate it ourselves.

That's boring infrastructure talk, but it matters. It means we're not building toward something and then rebuilding toward regulation. We're building toward regulation from day one. Creators can trust that their money is tracked with the precision a regulator demands.

The simplicity was the hardest part

Building three lines of code is easy. Building three lines of code that hide months of work is the opposite of easy. We spent longer arguing about what shouldn't be in SeedrButton than what should be. Every feature request was a test. Does this reduce friction, or add it? Does this make the creator's job harder, or easier?

The result is an SDK that creators and developers actually use without cursing us. A profile page that shows a real person, not a storefront. A dashboard that shows what mattered: how much came in, when it landed, what the fee was. And a payout schedule that doesn't make creators hate Mondays.

That's the whole thing. No tricks. No upsells buried in the settings. No dark patterns that nudge creators toward the expensive tier. Just the fastest path from fan intention to creator bank account that we could engineer.