We’re excited to announce that we’ve been working on a small side project for a few months called Lunatap, that recently got hunted on Product Hunt 📯
From Fitness to Payments
In July 2017, my younger brother and our COO, Aamir decided to kick off a fitness related startup, which unfortunately didn’t go as planned, but did result in the idea that was to become Lunatap.
Aamir wanted a super easy way to allow a coach or fitness instructor to be able to accept a payment on the go using their iPhone or Android device, whilst using his existing Stripe account. A number of simple solutions to this problem exist on both the App and Play Stores, but we found them to be expensive (in most cases adding 1% or more on top of Stripe’s standard fee structure) and not iterating significantly if at all after launch.
Enter Lunatap
We designed and built Lunatap to be a beautifully easy way to take your Stripe account on the road. We like to think that we’re at the beginnings of creating a tiny software based POS machine that’s on your phone rather than being an ugly bit of extra hardware that you need to charge and lug about. Lunatap does multi-currency, accepts input via type or scan, and is competitively priced at 0.1% on top of Stripe’s standard fees.
Iteration
We recently added support for Spanish, French and German, making it the first time that we’ve built a product in a set of languages where we have no native speakers on the team (yet!). Definitely an interesting challenge when running QA.
We also signed up to Stripe’s new partner programme and became a Stripe Verified Partner, giving us a really nice listing in the Work’s With Stripe directory and an even nicer co-branded marketing page right on Stripe’s site!
What’s Next
We’ve had a bunch of feedback about adding support to accept card input via NFC, which is likely to become our next big feature. Whilst definitely doable on Android, iOS’s CoreNFC framework currently only supports reading NFC tags in NDEF format which sadly rules out being able to read credit cards for the time being.
We’ve also had feature requests to bring more of Stripe’s native functionality such as pre-authorisations and refunds to Lunatap together with support for card readers and tablets, all of which we’re considering as areas to work on next.
We’re also debating adding support for other payment providers, but we’re big fans of Stripe, so this remains a hotly debated topic internally.
With almost 600 customers connected up and approaching half a million dollars in payment volume processed, we’re excited that about the potential of a small side project turning into an interesting product!
We really appreciate feedback, questions and comments or if you’d like to just get in touch, it’s best to do so via our support form.
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