Opinions on roadmaps range from ‘they bring in a structured approach’ to ‘they ultimately don’t help the customers’.
It has been quite a busy month at Hyperswitch HQ since our ProductHunt launch, and we’ve received a lot of feedback from the community. We had a number of meaningful discussions spanning topics across ideas for new payment flows, new payment processor integrations and improvements to the overall developer experience. As a next step, we have synthesized this wealth of information into a roadmap for the next two months. A lot has been said about product roadmaps.
We strongly look at our product roadmap as a tool to validate and constantly update our understanding of what it takes to make payments fast, reliable and affordable. We would like our roadmap to reflect a community-driven iterative learning approach while retaining room for experimentation. Having said that, here’s our plan for the months of March and April:
We have structured our releases into four categories:
Payment flows: This category refers to the core features and payment flows such as one-time & recurring payments, customers, payment methods, refunds etc.
Payment Processors: These are the set of all connectors / processors integrated and made available for the above-mentioned payment flows
Checkout experiences: Hyperswitch offers a cross-platform native checkout experience through its SDKs, and this category is all about creating a world-class checkout flow
Merchant Dashboard: This refers to the control centre that allows you to configure connectors, monitor payment activity, setup smart routing logic and bring transparency to your payment operations
Let’s jump right in!
Core Payment flows
Let’s start with our most requested feature, subscriptions. The subscription economy is rapidly growing and is projected to grow at a CAGR of ~15% in the next five years. The community feedback that we have received validates the need for subscription platforms, and hence we have decided to focus our efforts on building a subscription layer on top of our payments processing system.
There are majorly three types of players in the market for managing subscriptions.
Pureplay subscription management - Services that work on top of payment gateways to handle subscriptions every month
Hybrid platforms - Payment processors who provide a subscription layer
All-in-one billing platforms - Enterprise-focused billing and subscription management systems often include other areas of accounting, inventory, and E-Commerce control
Building a subscription layer on top of Hyperswitch will be advantageous as we can make use of the multiple available connectors. To begin with, we are thinking of incorporating the below key features as part of managing subscriptions:
Automated Recurring Billing: Support for managing subscription payments, including upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations.
Billing and invoicing: Support for automating the billing and invoicing process, reducing manual effort and errors.
Analytics and reporting: Dashboards with insights into subscription metrics such as churn rate, customer acquisition cost, and customer lifetime value
The other major release would be the smart router. The smart router is at the heart of Hyperswitch, as it lets you describe custom rules for how an incoming transaction would be routed across your configured payment processors. You can choose what you would like to optimize for when you establish these rules. As an example, given that multiple payment processors charge differently for different payment methods, you could try to optimize processing fees when you set these rules.
Payment Processors
Embracing payment diversity is critical to Hyperswitch’s mission, and we will achieve it by ensuring that our core payment flows are compatible with all kinds of payment processors. We want to start by covering the top 30 payment processors across the US and EU over March. There have also been a number of requests from the community for specific connectors, which we would cover immediately after. You can click here for a detailed look at our connector integration roadmap.
This is also the category of the roadmap where you can directly participate with OSS contributions. Embracing diversity brings its own challenges. We would love to work with the community to establish a long-term solution enabling different payment ecosystems to transact with one another.
Checkout Experiences
The design of the checkout experience has a significant impact on how users make payments. The extent to which the payment page blends with the merchant’s brand identity, the ability to order payment methods, consistency of payment experience across platforms, the level of control over the SDK and other small details come together to make or break the user experience. Unified Checkout 2.0 is the new and improved Hyperswitch payment page bringing you a no-code checkout page customization option. With this update to the SDK, you would be able to design a customized payment experience for your users directly from your Hyperswitch Dashboard.
Platform coverage is still a top priority for the SDK, and we will be releasing the android and iOS SDKs before updating the checkout experience. You can demo the android SDK by downloading the Hyperswitch Demo Store here.
Merchant Dashboard
Ultimately the control centre ties the whole of Hyperswitch together. Designed for maximum control and transparency, the Hyperswitch Dashboard will help you manage your entire payment operations from a single application. We are particularly excited about the analytics module, which will ensure visibility over success rates, latency, refund analytics etc., across your configured payment processors.
The control centre will also include the design studio for the updated Unified Checkout 2.0 SDK. This will allow you to customize your payment experience for web and mobile SDKs using the same interface.
How you can participate
Your inputs and feedback are extremely critical for the success of Hyperswitch. We are constantly on the lookout for creating more avenues for co-creating the future of payments. In order to facilitate collaboration across the community, we will soon be launching an RFC (Request for comments) process to debate and discuss major features. Until that happens, there are multiple areas across the Hyperswitch where you could make an OSS contribution:
A great start will be adding and enhancing Connector Integrations. You could also filter for the help-wanted label and contribute.
Comment on the issue thread on GitHub to let us know that you will be picking it up (please make sure you read the Contributing to Hyperswitch guidelines).
Join the Hyperswitch Slack group or Discord Server and use the developer support channels if you have any questions along the way.
Raise PR and collaborate with the allotted Hyperswitch team member to merge it.
Happy contributing!
Thanks Shakthidhar Bhaskar for co-authoring this blog.
