ZapPlanner - periodic payments in bitcoin
In short:
- Schedule Value 4 Value payments to a lightning address to support your favorite content creator
- Allow ZapPlanner to send payments on your behalf, that you have control to cancel whenever you wish
- ZapPlanner is just one example of the possibilities that NWC enables
Bitcoin is not made for subscription-based payments
Many stakeholders in the creator industry have been looking at alternatives or additions to the ad-based revenue model to diversify the income sources. As a consequence, today’s creator economy was built on subscribers and patrons. This lead to a massive boom in subscription businesses of both creator-led platforms like Patreon and Substack and enterprise companies like Netflix and Amazon. Normally subscriptions are payments requested by the receiving side. Blockchain-based systems like bitcoin are not built for it, but only allow to send payments. As a consequence, bitcoin finds no adoption in subscription-based payment services.
To solve this issue ZapPlanner was created.
Introducing ZapPlanner
ZapPlanner is a showcase that introduces the principle of push payments to simulate subscription payments. Push payments give control and privacy back to the user. The user manages the subscription rather than the service. Scheduled payments can be cancelled simply by not paying, and any wallet can be used to make a periodic payment, making it easier to stay anonymous.
ZapPlanner sends payments on your behalf, on a regular schedule. It’s an easy way to support your favorite Value4Value creators, and it’s motivating for them to receive consistent support, too!
ZapPlanner executes payments on the schedule that you specify, and will automatically stop the subscription if you stop it. So you always have control and can cancel the subscription at any time.
How to use ZapPlanner
- Go to https://zapplanner.albylabs.com/
- Click the 'New Periodic Payment' button and fill in the fields to specify who you want to pay, how much and how often.
- Click 'Continue', review the subscription you want to create and link your wallet or enter your nostr wallet connect URL. If you don’t have one, you can easily create one directly in the app.
- Click 'Create Periodic Payment'
- You will now be on your subscription page. You can bookmark it or receive a confirmation email for every payment you send.
- You can cancel the subscription at any time, either on the bookmarked page, or by removing your connection string on the Alby NWC app.
Leveraging Nostr Wallet Connect
ZapPlanner is built on Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) to enable seamless lightning functionality through a secure, indirect connection to your wallet, made possible by the exchange of Nostr events. Learn more about NWC here: Introducing Nostr Wallet Connect.
Before NWC you would need to use non-universal APIs in order to make payments on a user’s behalf. Like WebLN, NWC is a public specification that allows ZapPlanner to request payments from a user’s wallet in a common way. It gives consumers the choice to use their own wallet and removes the burden for developers to build custom interfaces.
NWC is a very powerful concept. Examples outside of Nostr like ZapPlanner show the possibilities.
Create a Subscription Service with ZapPlanner
You can link users of your service to ZapPlanner with a custom confirmation link containing a custom comment or include LUD-18 data which can be used to track payments and enable services for paying users. Click this link for an example and see the ZapPlanner README for more information.
Build your own App with NWC
ZapPlanner uses Alby's packages: alby-tools to parse a lightning address and request an invoice using LNURL and the Alby SDK in order to send payment request notes and read responses (with the preimage) defined by the NIP-47 spec.
Do you have any other ideas or want to contribute and improve ZapPlanner? create an issue on the github repository or send us an email!
Until then try out ZapPlanner and support your favorite content creator with Value4Value payments.