Ask HN: Does "Zapier for payment automation" exist?

It's 2026 and I shouldn't spend 3 hours every month manually splitting $15K revenue:

• 50% to co-founder • 10% across 3 contractors • 5-10% to ~15 affiliates • 30% to tax account

This should be automated. Maybe through a kind of workflow builder that can trigger money flows.

What I've tried:

- Stripe Connect: Only splits to one account - Zapier: Can't actually move money (ToS restriction) - Manual scripts: Works but I'm now maintaining financial infrastructure. - Escrow.com: $100 min fee, designed for one-off transactions

What I want: Set rules once → money routes automatically each month.

Questions:

1. Does this exist? (Feels like I'm bad at searching)

2. If not, why? Regulatory? Nobody trusts automation with money? Technical blocker? Stable coins could maybe help shipping this.

3. What's your current solution? Custom code? Just manual transfers?

I've talked to ~20 founders. Most are either: - Writing custom scripts (requires dev skills + maintenance) - Paying accountants (expensive, still manual) - Suffering through manual transfers (time sink)

Seems like a gap between "fully manual" and "build your own payment infrastructure."

Am I missing something obvious?

Relay does a good job of automatically partitioning money, though you still need to manually execute external payments. Gives you a little extra interest on money allocated for taxes too

https://relayfi.com/

I used Zapier a lot, including for Stripe integrations (though I don’t remember if it was for doing payments). It required many zaps, came with a lot of limitations too.

In the end, I wrote a custom API, which saved a lot of money. I’m also not sure it’s easy to properly implement a Stripe connection (using the Stripe library) inside a custom code action in automation tools.

This is what smart contracts do.

A smart contract with a stablecoin (or a wrapped stabblecoin) would probably solve for this use case.

You want to avoid leaving a bank password in clear text for the process running in cron; so it would really be best for the bank to support Read-Only and Read-Write access tokens

Good point on smart contracts: that's one approach I'm exploring.

Trying to figure out if this should be: - Crypto-native from day 1 (smart contracts + stablecoins) - Fiat-first with crypto as backend (abstract the blockchain) - Pure fiat (traditional banking APIs)

What would you actually use?

Would be interesting to have a way for each recipient to opt-in for their preferred currency. Am thinking about recent headline: "Crypto payment cards surge 22x in daily transactions since late 2024."

Just curious, if you didn't have smart contracts, you would have 20 destination addresses, and then a spreadsheet that you'd use each month and then run a local wallet to do the sending to the different parties, right? That's pretty easy.

Could that be automated on the client-side with macros or a custom program (ie no smart contracts?)

Multisig with no smart contract is the simplest escrow.

It's probably simple to find a validated smart contract that splits its inputs to multiple outputs?

If there is transaction privacy for the smart contracts, then how to verify that the contract actually still sends to the correct - initially configured - parties?

And then logging. Task accounting implies logging, but logs are bytes that cost money in a blockchain so is the transaction log sufficient

Isn’t this just something the bank should do?

My bank account lets me set up recurring transfers. I assume it’s a standard feature for most banks.

I think sequence fulfills this requirement? https://www.getsequence.io/

This should be available in your bank or other treasury management provider automation. Does your bank not support this? If you're not getting this from your current biz bank, I would shop around. I recommend Mercury (no affiliation, just a happy customer), but others provide some level of this too.

(workflow automation providers do not want this liability, as you note in Zapier's ToS, which is totally fair)

Does Mercury actually support this? Or are you describing scheduled payments (which still require manual setup each time)?

I'm looking for: - Dynamic rules based on revenue amount - Multiple variable destinations - Percentage-based splits - One-time setup, runs forever

Maybe I'm missing a Mercury feature? What's the workflow you use?

Im a Brex user and interested by this

You could hire someone and buy back your time.

I am faling to understand how do you spend 3 hours distributing money across ~20 accounts. That's normally like 30 mins altogether with coffee, cigarettes and chitchat in between.

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