How I Added Paid Tiers to My Discord Bot Without Stripe or Any Payment API

Most tutorials for monetizing a Discord bot assume you'll integrate Stripe or LemonSqueezy directly into the bot. I went a different route, manual grants via Ko-fi. Here's why and how. The problem with payment APIs in bots For a new bot with low volume, integrating a full payment API means: Webhook endpoints to maintain Subscription management logic Refund handling Failed payment handling That's a lot of complexity for a bot that might have 10 paying customers at launch. The Ko-fi manual grant approach Instead, I set up Ko-fi as the payment page and handle grants manually: Customer buys on Ko-fi I get a notification I run /grant guild_id:123456 days:30 in my admin server Bot updates the database and unlocks paid features python@app_commands.command(name="grant") async def grant_paid(self, interaction, guild_id: str, days: int = 30): if not await is_bot_owner(interaction): return expires_at = int(time.time()) + (days * 86400) await upsert_subscription(self.db, guild_id=guild_id, tier="p