Why Indian developers can't get paid online — and how I fixed it
By Shoryavardhaan Gupta · May 2026 · 4 min read
A few weeks before shipping, I posted on r/indiandevs asking if anyone else couldn't accept support for their open source work without Stripe. 29 upvotes. 33 comments. 9.4K views. Turns out everyone had the same problem and nobody was solving it. Just coping. Workarounds. A quiet acceptance that this is how it is.
Buy Me a Coffee? Stripe. Ko-fi? Stripe. GitHub Sponsors? Stripe. PayPal works, but the fees and UX are embarrassing.
In a lot of countries you simply don't get Stripe access — no clear criteria, no appeal process, just a wall. Dropping your UPI ID in a README feels janky. Unprofessional. International supporters have no clean way to send anything. That gap is real and nobody was building for it.
So I built Buy4Chai. A self-hosted supporter page with Razorpay and UPI out of the box. But it doesn't stop there — if you have any payment link, manual or otherwise, you can integrate it. The setup video and AI prompts walk you through adding your own gateway without touching much code. Fork it, edit one config file, deploy to Vercel in ten minutes. Zero platform fees. Money goes directly to you.
I posted it back to the same community. The numbers look small on the internet — GitHub stars, forks, LinkedIn likes, reposts. But there's something else to those numbers.
Picture those people physically in a room saying "this actually solves my problem." That's not small. That's real.
It's not perfect. But the wheel is turning. Open source, MIT license. Contributions welcome, issues open, discussions open. Would love to build on this with you.
See the Buy4Chai project →