Hey everyone! Here’s an update on the current status of the Livepeer Clearinghouse project.
PymtHouse Public Release
I’m excited to announce PymtHouse is now officially live for builders to begin building applications! Our production remote signer was funded with a $450 credit from our community engagement budget, which will support the initial $5/month of network usage credit included in our Free Developer plan. I’ve also expanded the login to support multiple social integrations, including GitHub and Discord.
Over the past three weeks, I’ve been working closely with @qiang.han and core developers @j0sh and @rickstaa to align PymtHouse usage tracking with the new pipeline/model attribution changes for the go-livepeer 0.9.0 release.Yesterday a handful of developers (@jjassonn69 and others) tested the platform and found it very useful for prototyping their new network capabilities with live-runner.
The new go-livepeer release (live-runner) supports three billing unit types: fixed, hour, and pixels. These are represented by the Pipeline name in usage reporting. I have improved the usage attribution and billing pages to inform the Developer of where usage is coming from.
The changes included recording usage in billable seconds, fixed, or pixels and supports custom capabilities on the Livepeer network.
Default Payment Method + Stripe Integration
The integration of real payment processing has been my primary focus of the past week. Stripe integration is still under development. Users will be limited to $5 of usage until this work is completed (ETA this week).
Personal API Keys
PymtHouse has two types of users Developers (you) + M2M users (your customers). I’ve heard feedback from some users that the site could do more to address needs of users who simply want to try the network without creating a full builder application. In response to this feedback, I’ve added a simple API Keys feature to all developer accounts, which allows you to get an API key for sending work to the network directly using your own account.
Usage and billing attribution
Due to the ongoing payments integration work with Stripe, M2M end-user payment flows have not been fully implemented yet. A scope change was identified last week.
Specifically, Stripe integration works with OpenMeter directly with a single merchant account. This addresses the needs for me to bill developers for their usage, but it does not provide a merchant payments interface for Developers to provide in their own applications.
OpenMeter has several advantages to using their built-in invoicing system, notably automatic invoicing and charges mid-cycle based on usage/overage. This works out of the box with OpenMeter’s native Stripe integration, but for Stripe Connect I need to configure Custom Invoicing webhooks within OpenMeter to PymtHouse. Given the significant scale of this effort and architecture, I decided to ship by rolling up M2M usage billing to the Developer account for now. As soon as the native Stripe billing ships this week, developers will be able to move beyond their $5 credit limit.
PymtHouse docs update
I’ve published a new builder integration guide to the docs at https://docs.pymthouse.com. The OpenAPI reference has also been cleaned up to show only relevant routes.
Livepeer Clearinghouse Milestones
I am doing my best to serve the needs of developers like @qiang.han who are providing rapid feedback while building on PymtHouse as the hosted solution, while also trying to maintain the planned roadmap for the RFP Grant deliverables.
Milestone 3 is still in progress and has been delayed by the billing and usage changes that were needed over the past weeks. I’ve merged these related fixed to livepeer/clearinghouse and configured a release CI for the identity-webhook builds so that livepeer/clearinghouse and pymthouse are using the same canonical identity/usage contract.
The remaining steps are to finalize the administrative API PR and provide documentation for the clearinghouse stack. The repository is already an accurate representation of the architecture, but it lacks the automatic customer creation and subscription flows, those are bootstrap scripts only at the moment (bash). To expedite the effort, I plan to begin deployments from the livepeer/clearinghouse repository to railway for the core services and ship a clear integration guide.
I appreciate everyone’s patience as I have been juggling both sides of this effort. In retrospect, there are always some lessons to learn from project plan execution and timelines.
Scope refinement
For the final implementation of the livepeer/clearinghouse administrative API, I plan to keep it declarative and single-tenant for simplicity as I understand we need to wrap up this project timely. The cloud events for usage tracking and identity-webhook can still be used on multi-tenant clearinghouses like pymthouse, and the same code will be consumed by both. The general direction is to onboard users to PymtHouse and begin promoting multiple GTM efforts using the platform.
Open to any questions!