Why I Walked Away From Stripe and Built the Payment Gateway the World Actually Needs.
Shorupan Pirakaspathy3 min read·Just now--
Garage Pay is live. And it’s just the beginning of something much bigger.
I want to tell you something most founders wouldn’t say out loud.
For months, we were losing one out of every two card payment attempts on our platform. Two people would pull out their card, hit pay — and only one would get through. The other would get rejected. Silently. Frustratingly. Gone.
That is not a minor inconvenience. That is a crisis.
So we stopped patching the problem and built the solution ourselves. That solution is Garage Pay — our in-house, end-to-end payment gateway. And it is LIVE!
Why I Built Our Own Gateway
I was never comfortable building a platform on top of someone else’s limitations. Every rejected payment, every unsupported currency, every customer who wanted to pay with UPI or Zelle or crypto — I couldn’t fix any of it without filing a request with a third-party provider and waiting weeks.
That ends now. When something breaks, I fix it. When someone needs a new payment method, I add it — in days, not months.
The long-term vision is clear: a fully licensed payment gateway that competes directly with Stripe in the West and Razorpay in India.
What Garage Pay Actually Does
The core innovation is simple but powerful — the complete decoupling of how a business prices its products from how a customer pays for them.
A business owner prices in any currency. The customer pays in any currency — including over 350 cryptocurrencies through our integration with Now Payments. The two sides of the transaction are entirely independent of each other.
Want to go big in Japan? I add Japanese Yen. Mexico? Same process. Venmo and Zelle for US customers? Done. The entire system is modular — any payment method, any currency, any market, added on demand.
Every transaction also generates a fully automated invoice the moment a customer shows purchase intent — branded, trackable, and active until payment is completed. No staff required. No invoices slipping through the cracks.
On top of that, we’ve built coupon infrastructure for promotions and are rolling out automated sales tax compliance across jurisdictions — all before our June 20th launch.
Crypto Payouts for Affiliates
Affiliates can withdraw their commissions in cryptocurrency. No $13 wire transfer fees. No bank delays. Just a clean, fast crypto payout in Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, or whatever they prefer.
Coming shortly after: the ability to use commission balances to pay for subscriptions directly — no withdrawal needed.
The Bigger Picture
Garage Pay is not a feature I built to check a box. It is the foundation of a payments business — one that every business owner on our platform benefits from for free, today, and will continue to benefit from as we grow.
Not a dependency on someone else’s infrastructure. A platform that builds the infrastructure itself — and shares it with you.
I’m Shorupan, founder and CEO of Garage. We are 73 days from our biggest launch yet on June 20th. Follow along for daily feature updates.
