Inspiration

Solo devs and small teams build the app themselves, yet Apple can come in a take up to 30% of revenue before any money reaches them. Through a recent court ruling, Apple is forced to allow apps to link to their own checkout. However, for a solo dev or small team, setting up their individual checkout process can be too much work.

We introduced Ferry, a simple way for indie devs to link their checkout to an external checkout from the Apple ecosystem. It only takes one api call and a reacting to a webhook to allow solo devs to see more of what they should have earned.

How we built it

Ferry is a [Next.js] app with [shadcn/ui] and a [Drizzle]-backed database.

Developer dashboard: developers create apps, add products (like gem bundles or cosmetics), generate API keys, and see their revenue all in one place.
Money layer on Nessie: we used Capital One's Nessie API as the financial backbone. Simulating bank accounts, money transfers, and payments.
Payment engine and HTTP API: a payment engine records purchases, subscriptions, and refunds, and exposes a simple HTTP API that an app calls to start a checkout and check what a user owns.
Hosted checkout: when a user taps "Buy," the app opens our checkout page in an in-app browser. After payment, the purchase unlocks in the app.
Demo game: a game with an in-game store, shown with the standard in-app purchase flow next to the Ferry flow.

Challenges

Some challenges we faced are the fact that this is our first time trying out the Nessie and most of the time used was in figuring out what Nessie was capable of.