Inspiration
India has ~2M freelancers earning from foreign clients, yet most deals start as informal Hindi/Hinglish WhatsApp chats. Converting chat into an English contract, then an invoice, then a verified payment means juggling translators, the PayPal dashboard, and CA paperwork. One missed follow-up is one lost payment. We built the agent that sits in the middle and never sleeps.
What it does
Paste a Hindi/Hinglish/English chat and AI extracts the client, price,
deliverables, deadline, and revisions into an editable quotation — which you
approve. Then a real PayPal Sandbox invoice is prepared, confirmed, created,
and sent. The client pays on PayPal's hosted page; the app re-reads PayPal,
verifies PAID plus a PAYPAL transaction plus the exact amount, and logs it.
A dashboard shows verified totals per currency with timelines and history.
An AI assistant answers questions about your money, drafts reminders (never
auto-sends), and flags out-of-scope client requests with draft replies.
How we built it
Next.js 16 + Tailwind CSS v4 + Motion frontend. FastAPI + SQLAlchemy + MySQL
backend. PayPal Invoicing API v2 (OAuth 2.0, create/send/get invoice,
INVOICING.INVOICE.PAID webhooks with cryptographic signature verification).
Free-tier LLM via OpenRouter with a balanced-brace JSON parser and
human-approval gates before every financial action. No escrow, no payouts —
only receiver-side APIs an Indian merchant can legally use.
Challenges we ran into
PayPal Payouts cannot originate from India and true escrow violates PayPal policy, so we pivoted from escrow to invoice-plus-verify early. Free-tier AI models kept failing (one was not actually free, one was rate-limited) until we landed on a working free model. Webhook race conditions (a PAID event arriving before the capture is visible) forced a pending-until-verified design with idempotent retries.
Accomplishments
A genuine end-to-end Sandbox payment: $60.00 USD, India merchant to US buyer,
verified PAID with PayPal transaction 1CA8182964133384M — displayed live
in the product, zero mocks. 40+ automated tests green.
What we learned
Sandbox is not production (India needs live KYC/PAN/bank); verify-first beats trust-first for money; free-tier AI needs defensive parsing, not hope.
What's next
Public deployment with webhooks registered, per-transaction FIRA reconciliation, and a Rs 499/month SaaS plan for freelancers.
Built With
- fastapi
- mysql
- next.js
- openrouter
- paypal-invoicing-api
- paypal-rest-api
- tailwind-css
