- Overview of Bagelpay

How We Built BagelPay’s V1 to Help Indie Hackers Get Paid Fast

Core feature for Payments & Billing Platform for SaaS

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Lead Product and design for end-to-end workflows

Defined product vision. Prioritised roadmap. Led concepting with design. Made final V1 ship decisions.

A lean builder team

1 x Brand designer, 2 x full‑stack engineers, 1 x go‑to‑market

Why design for the “first dollar”?

Many indie hackers and AI builders (espcially some Asian countries, such like China, India) are strong on shipping products but get stuck on the “how do I charge legally, safely, and across borders?” question.

We saw an opportunity: turn “collecting the first dollar” into a clear, guided journey, we could dramatically lower the operational friction of starting a global software business

PS: Simply put, many Chinese builders can’t easily use Stripe because they don’t have overseas addresses or bank accounts, and most payment products don’t support local methods like Alipay and WeChat Pay.

- Define

Key Problem Space

LLM products often charge per token, per API request, or per inference, which means the system has to meter every call in real time and link it to the right customer and plan.

Sending reliable global payouts (to creators, affiliates, suppliers) in local currencies or stablecoins is operationally heavy.

Managing different billing models, Builder has few typical billing modal usage‑based billing, recurring subscriptions (with add‑ons and upgrades), and simple one‑time purchases and more.

- The Great Simplification

Key Features

Get paid fast globally

Accept payments from 135+countries right out of the box with less setup.

Track your business insights

Keep track of your monthly recurring revenue, orders, and income from our dashboard

Payout to your fiat / crypto wallets

Paying your suppliers or withdrawing funds using fiat or stablecoins.

Flexible Billing Models

Usage-based, subscription-based (with add-ons), and one-time payments come built in

- Key Feature: 1

Track your business insights

An overview dashboard only shows these KPI builder really care about (also can show off on social media :P)

So we chose to build our first & foundational AI agent to empower users with automated data analysis and reporting.

Design Decisions:

Lead with simple, positive metric cards (MRR, total revenue, orders, available balance) to create confidence

Support real-time transactions information reinforces the feeling that BagelPay is actively working for me.

Displaying gross volume as a line chart makes it much easier to perceive trends and spot anomalies.

Business dashboard showing revenue, deals, customer list, growth chart, and new activity.

- Key Feature: 2

Flexible Billing Models

LLM products might charge per token, per month, or pay‑as‑you‑go, so we designed BagelPay to support as much as possibly of these common billing models.

So we chose to build our first & foundational AI agent to empower users with automated data analysis and reporting.

From case studies in our builder community, we noticed many founders start by offering free trials or discounts, so we decided to quickly add a discount feature to support that behavior.