#payments
Stripe, Square, refunds and money moving.
2026
The entitlement arrived. The feature still is not live.
Field notesOn 6 November Apple granted the Tap to Pay entitlement we had asked for since September. Workers still cannot use it, because the build sitting in Apple's separate App Store review would lose its place in the queue if we swapped it now.
Postgres to D1, with the rollback timed first
Deep diveD1 has no interactive transactions, and TipBop's payouts relied on them. How we moved a tipping app in beta off Postgres in a day: a lease row for the locks, one schema for 37 migrations, and a rollback we timed before we needed it.
A green health check and an empty database
PostmortemTipBop moved to Cloud Run on 17 September with a test-mode Stripe key, placeholder secrets, no data and no photos. The health check said ok the whole time. What it was checking, what it should have checked, and the two guards we added.
The customer pays the fee, so the worker gets every penny
Decision recordOn a £5 tip the customer pays £5.60 and the worker gets exactly £5.00. Taking a cut out of the tip instead loses money on small tips and breaks the one promise TipBop makes. Here is the arithmetic.