The URL That Changed How Our Creators Get Tipped

The moment we realised the SDK wasn't enough

We built the SeedrButton first. Three lines of code in Swift or Kotlin, drop it into any MRVL app, and your audience can tip you with no account, no friction. We were pleased with that. Clean. Minimal. Exactly what we'd sketched on napkins six months earlier.

But the SDK solved only half the problem. Yes, creators could collect tips inside Streamr or Giggl or Foundr. But the real world doesn't work that way. A creator's audience lives in text threads, Discord, Instagram captions, emails. They're not all inside our ecosystem. We were building a payment tool for people who were already paying. We needed to build for everyone else.

That's when we started asking different questions. What if a creator could own a single URL they could share anywhere? What if that URL was simple enough to text, flexible enough to work on a church bulletin, reliable enough to hand to a livestream chat with 500 people in it?

A personal web profile that doesn't require an account

The creator web profile at seedr.app/@handle became our answer. We made it deliberately spare. Your name. Your photo. A link to tip. That's the visible part. Behind it sits the real infrastructure: a Supabase backend shared with the SDK, direct Stripe Connect for no-account tipping, weekly Monday payouts to your bank, and analytics that show you who tipped when and how much.

What mattered most was this: a fan doesn't need to sign up. They don't need to download anything. They tap the link, they see the creator, they send a tip (minimum £5), and it's done. For faith creators especially, this felt right. A church community member seeing a link in a sermon announcement, tapping it in the moment, giving because they want to. No friction. No registration form.

We set minimum payouts at £20 so creators aren't left chasing pennies, and minimum tips at £5 to keep the economics sensible. Every transaction is logged in integer pence because we're building toward FCA authorisation by 2028. Every detail matters when you're handling money.

Why the SDK and the web profile had to be the same thing

Here's what we could have done: built a separate web profile that wasn't connected to the app embedding. Two systems. Two databases. Two payment flows. Simpler, in a way.

We didn't. The SeedrButton in Streamr and the profile at seedr.app/@handle both talk to the same backend. The same analytics dashboard serves both surfaces. A creator's earnings are in one place. Payouts happen once a week, on Monday, whether the tip came from inside an app or from a link someone shared in a Facebook post.

That decision meant more work. It meant thinking through edge cases: what if someone tips through the app and through the web profile in the same week? What if the creator changes their profile photo, does it update everywhere? But it also meant we could build something honest. One creator, one audience, one set of earnings. Not fragmented into little pockets of transactions they have to reconcile themselves.

The analytics that actually matter

We built the creator dashboard because we were tired of guessing. Every creator we talked to wanted the same thing: to know if their audience was showing up. Not vanity metrics. Real numbers. How much came in this week. Who sent the biggest tips. When did tips arrive (which helps you spot patterns in your own content).

The dashboard is part of the same system. Log in, see your analytics, set up your payout bank account, and you're done. No separate login. No forgotten passwords. If you're Foundr Free or Foundr Pro, your platform fee drops from 5% to 1.5% or 1% respectively, and that shows in your payouts too. Transparency baked in.

Building toward regulated payments without the weight

We're not FCA authorised yet. We don't need to be. Stripe Connect is, and that's who handles the money. But every design choice we've made has FCA authorisation in mind. Every schema. Every fee structure. Every integer in pence.

This matters because we're planning toward Phase 3 of the MRVL Pay roadmap, when we'll become a Payment Institution ourselves. We've already watched payment companies fail because they built their systems carelessly, then had to rebuild under regulatory scrutiny. We're building once, and building right. The AML threshold at £10,000 exists not because we're paranoid but because we're thinking ahead. Everything is documented. Everything is auditable.