OwnPay is an open-source organization building self-hosted payment infrastructure giving developers, merchants, and businesses complete ownership of their financial stack. We pioneered the world's first self-hosted white-label custom-domain checkout architecture: one server, multiple brands, each on its own domain, logo, and color scheme customers see your brand, never OwnPay.

Hi HN, I built OwnPay (https://github.com/own-pay/OwnPay), a sovereign, self-hosted payment orchestrator built in modern PHP 8.3+. Most payment platforms force you to become a tenant on their servers - your customers, financial records, and transaction logs flow through a third-party SaaS taking a cut on top of gateway fees. OwnPay flips that: you deploy it on your own server (shared hosting, VPS, or bare metal), and you own 100% of your data and fee margins. Key Technical Decisions: 1. No Heavyweight Framework Magic: Built without Laravel/Symfony runtime overhead - sub-millisecond boots with pure PSR-4 autoloading, a PSR-11 DI container, and PDO prepared statements (PHPStan Level 9 strict analysis). 2. GAAP Double-Entry Ledger: Money calculations use BCMath string arithmetic with mutex SELECT FOR UPDATE locks to prevent double-crediting or race conditions. 3. Multi-Brand Custom Domains: Manage multiple isolated brands/stores from one superadmin dashboard, each on their own verified white-label custom domain. 4. Autonomous SMS Verification: A paired Android companion app parses real-time bank/MFS SMS notifications and auto-matches customer payments. 5. Sandboxed Plugin Architecture: 120+ gateway adapters running under an AST-scanned security sandbox. You can try the live demo without installing: https://demo.ownpay.org/login (Credentials: admin / admin123) The code is licensed under AGPL-3.0: https://github.com/own-pay/OwnPay I would love your feedback on the double-entry ledger architecture and gateway isolation model. Happy to answer any questions!

Integrated OwnPay into our checkout flow to handle multi-currency transactions without wrestling with multiple regional gateways. The API setup was straightforward, and webhooks trigger cleanly on status updates without random dropped events. Having payout reconciliation and fee breakdowns organized in a single dashboard saved our ops workflow several hours of manual tracking each week.

The transaction export feature needs custom field support right now, CSV downloads don't include custom metadata tags, which requires extra manual sorting for accounting. Additionally, the mobile dashboard layout feels cramped and could use better responsive formatting.

Evaluated standard payment setups like Stripe and Paddle. Went with OwnPay because the cross-border processing fees were lower for our primary customer regions, and the onboarding verification was significantly faster.

OwnPay

Self-hosted, open-source payment gateway software

Self-hosted, open-source payment gateway software

What's great

What needs improvement

vs Alternatives

What's great

What needs improvement

vs Alternatives