6/04/2026
Web3 has payments. It doesn't have billing.
KD
Founder & Architect
If you run a SaaS business, you don't think much about how billing works. Your customer puts in a card, you charge it every month, Stripe handles the rest. It's boring infrastructure and that's the point.
Now imagine you want to charge in USDC instead. Maybe your customers are DAOs, protocol teams, or crypto-native businesses. Maybe you just want faster settlement without chargeback exposure. Whatever the reason, you decide to try it.
Here's what you find out: there is no recurring billing in Web3.
Not "it's harder" or "it needs some setup." It literally does not exist as a concept. Every payment in Web3 is a push. The user initiates it, signs it, and sends it. There is no mechanism for you, the merchant, to pull a payment when it's due.
So when your customer's subscription renews, you have to ask them to come back and sign again. Every cycle. Every month. What should feel like a seamless renewal instead feels like a re-purchase. Some customers do it. A lot don't.
You're not losing them because they're unhappy. You're losing them because the infrastructure makes retention feel like friction.
This is a billing problem, not a payments problem.
Web3 has solved payments. You can move USDC across the world in seconds, settle instantly, skip the banking rails entirely. The payments layer works.
What's missing is the authorization layer. The thing that sits upstream of a payment and answers one question: is this merchant still allowed to charge this customer?
In traditional finance, this is what Direct Debit does. The customer authorizes a mandate once. From that point on, the merchant can pull payments on schedule without asking again. The customer stays in control and can cancel at any time, but the default is continuity, not friction.
Web3 has no equivalent. Until now, building recurring revenue on stablecoins meant either asking customers to sign every cycle, building a custodial system where you hold their funds, or giving up and staying on fiat rails.
None of those are good options.
What a billing primitive actually needs to do
The reason Direct Debit works in traditional finance is that it separates authorization from execution. The customer says "yes, you can charge me" once. The merchant executes against that authorization on schedule. Two distinct steps, handled by different parts of the system.
Web3 conflates them. Every execution requires a fresh authorization. That's fine for one-off payments. It breaks down completely for anything recurring.
A proper billing primitive needs to:
Let users pre-authorize future payments, scoped to a specific merchant and amount
Let merchants execute against that authorization without needing the user present
Enforce the rules on-chain so neither side has to trust the other
Keep user funds in their wallet until the moment of payment
That last one matters. Custodial approaches exist, but they require users to deposit funds upfront. That's a different product with different risk. The primitive should be non-custodial by design.
Why this is the right moment
Stablecoin settlement is arriving. Visa is settling transactions in USDC. Shift4 launched merchant stablecoin infrastructure. The $33 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume in 2025 headline is no longer a crypto stat, it's a fintech stat.
The merchants following that trend are going to want billing to work the same way their payments do. Right now, it doesn't.
The gap between "accept stablecoins" and "run a real recurring business on stablecoins" is a billing stack. Webhooks, retry logic, revenue reporting, dunning. The unsexy operational layer that Stripe spent a decade building for card rails.
That's what needs to exist for stablecoin SaaS to be real.
We're building it
amser is a non-custodial recurring billing protocol built on Base. It lets merchants run subscription and usage billing in USDC without custody, without asking customers to sign every cycle, and without building the infrastructure themselves.
We're working with a small group of early merchants to get the first version right. If you're building any kind of recurring revenue model and stablecoin settlement is on your radar, we'd like to talk.