Ask HN: Does "Zapier for payment automation" exist?

Posted by PL_Venard 3 days ago

It's 2026 and I shouldn't spend 3 hours every month manually splitting $15K revenue:

• 50% to co-founder • 10% across 3 contractors • 5-10% to ~15 affiliates • 30% to tax account

This should be automated. Maybe through a kind of workflow builder that can trigger money flows.

What I've tried:

- Stripe Connect: Only splits to one account - Zapier: Can't actually move money (ToS restriction) - Manual scripts: Works but I'm now maintaining financial infrastructure. - Escrow.com: $100 min fee, designed for one-off transactions

What I want: Set rules once → money routes automatically each month.

Questions:

1. Does this exist? (Feels like I'm bad at searching)

2. If not, why? Regulatory? Nobody trusts automation with money? Technical blocker? Stable coins could maybe help shipping this.

3. What's your current solution? Custom code? Just manual transfers?

I've talked to ~20 founders. Most are either: - Writing custom scripts (requires dev skills + maintenance) - Paying accountants (expensive, still manual) - Suffering through manual transfers (time sink)

Seems like a gap between "fully manual" and "build your own payment infrastructure."

Am I missing something obvious?

Comments

Comment by toomuchtodo 3 days ago

This should be available in your bank or other treasury management provider automation. Does your bank not support this? If you're not getting this from your current biz bank, I would shop around. I recommend Mercury (no affiliation, just a happy customer), but others provide some level of this too.

(workflow automation providers do not want this liability, as you note in Zapier's ToS, which is totally fair)

Comment by PL_Venard 3 days ago

Does Mercury actually support this? Or are you describing scheduled payments (which still require manual setup each time)?

I'm looking for: - Dynamic rules based on revenue amount - Multiple variable destinations - Percentage-based splits - One-time setup, runs forever

Maybe I'm missing a Mercury feature? What's the workflow you use?

Im a Brex user and interested by this

Comment by adrianwaj 18 hours ago

Wait, have you seen this? https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/request-network

"As 2025 ends, we’re recounting this year’s launch, the Request Network API allowing builders to accept crypto payments, manage payouts, and invoicing flows via API endpoints, with many others to come next year."

https://x.com/RequestNetwork/status/2006364797936488742

I personally think payment tech should stay as in-house as possible for security reasons. Can't something be vibe-coded? Don't give others the temptation to spy.

And from my understanding and slight observations, the French are experts in commercial espionage. Please, someone disagree.

BUT, for you this is a French startup, so I thought you'd like it.

Also: https://www.lightspark.com/ https://www.polarfi.com/

Comment by stevenicr 13 hours ago

I asked for something similar on HN some time ago and the response I remember was 'if there was a market for this it would exist' - I explained the huge marker and need for it.

The first one I saw that said they did a percentage split I think was/is the "lily card" ? - then 'the founders card' (which is way too expensive for my taste)

Then I had someone from chase bank offer to setup a personal account for me, and I flippantly said sure if you can give me the ability to split percentages every time I get paid / deposit money.. and I know what you are going to say 'that's easy, just know what you are going to deposit, do the math and enter the amount.. full stop - I don't want that - that has been available for a long time everywhere..

This lady told me you can do a percentage now - she was pretty sure she saw that in her training.. took some time to bring it up.. but yes right there on the screen, and she printed it for me..

ability to split a percentage when money comes in..

Now I have not gotten into the details yet - like can you set a percentage for one source coming in and a different one for another?

for my use case I just simply wanted 34% going to a saving account every time I put money in, and that appears doable there now.

When I saw you list I just thought, do a 50/10/10/30 split have the 10 for affliates just be another account - when money hits there do your 15 split..

Things may get wonky splitting your third account, the 10% for 3 contractors - I think bank match gets weird when it hits a 3.3333% - I would hope there are rules for adjusting in there, but I have not yet seen the system to know.

I actually tried a similar thing when someone set me up with ADP payments a few months ago - they had an option to send 67% to one account and the rest to a different bank account - I was shocked.. and even though I think it had a thing that said if there is leftover pennies or partial percentage just push the rest to X choice..

however it did not go through for some reason - whoever managed that company's ADP stuff said there was some error they had to manually do a thing, don't recall.

Anyhow, I am glad to see that some options are becoming available for this finally - there were none I could find a while back.

I had wanted to do a twitter campaign tagging each major bank and explaining how a bunch of people need this and the bank that rolls it out can be attractive to the gig economy and freelancers big time.

Comment by rvillanueva 2 days ago

Relay does a good job of automatically partitioning money, though you still need to manually execute external payments. Gives you a little extra interest on money allocated for taxes too

https://relayfi.com/

Comment by cstdsmrtcntrct 3 days ago

This is what smart contracts do.

A smart contract with a stablecoin (or a wrapped stabblecoin) would probably solve for this use case.

You want to avoid leaving a bank password in clear text for the process running in cron; so it would really be best for the bank to support Read-Only and Read-Write access tokens

Comment by PL_Venard 3 days ago

Good point on smart contracts: that's one approach I'm exploring.

Trying to figure out if this should be: - Crypto-native from day 1 (smart contracts + stablecoins) - Fiat-first with crypto as backend (abstract the blockchain) - Pure fiat (traditional banking APIs)

What would you actually use?

Comment by adrianwaj 2 days ago

Would be interesting to have a way for each recipient to opt-in for their preferred currency. Am thinking about recent headline: "Crypto payment cards surge 22x in daily transactions since late 2024."

Just curious, if you didn't have smart contracts, you would have 20 destination addresses, and then a spreadsheet that you'd use each month and then run a local wallet to do the sending to the different parties, right? That's pretty easy.

Could that be automated on the client-side with macros or a custom program (ie no smart contracts?)

Comment by cstdsmrtcntrct 2 days ago

Multisig with no smart contract is the simplest escrow.

It's probably simple to find a validated smart contract that splits its inputs to multiple outputs?

If there is transaction privacy for the smart contracts, then how to verify that the contract actually still sends to the correct - initially configured - parties?

And then logging. Task accounting implies logging, but logs are bytes that cost money in a blockchain so is the transaction log sufficient

Comment by jesterson 2 days ago

I am faling to understand how do you spend 3 hours distributing money across ~20 accounts. That's normally like 30 mins altogether with coffee, cigarettes and chitchat in between.

Comment by ada1981 1 day ago

Maybe OP doesn’t smoke?

Comment by keiferski 2 days ago

Isn’t this just something the bank should do?

My bank account lets me set up recurring transfers. I assume it’s a standard feature for most banks.

Comment by maomaomiumiu 2 days ago

I used Zapier a lot, including for Stripe integrations (though I don’t remember if it was for doing payments). It required many zaps, came with a lot of limitations too.

In the end, I wrote a custom API, which saved a lot of money. I’m also not sure it’s easy to properly implement a Stripe connection (using the Stripe library) inside a custom code action in automation tools.