Payment Processor Fun 2025 – Making Your Own Merchant Service Provider

Summary

2025-08-14: Payment Processor Fun 2025 -- Making Your Own MSP Valve and Itch have been in the spotlight for being more or less forced by "Payment processors" to pull certain adult content off their storefronts. The short story of it is Valve pulled a couple of games down while Itch pulled down everything marked mature/adult temporarily and had to sort through their entire library to find certain kinds of content to remove. One of these responses drew more ire than the other, understandably. I tend to believe this is a factor of how big they are and how much weight they had to swing around to fight back. But that's not really the point of this ramble. Two of the big things I see repeated over and over in criticism of Itch specifically here: "Itch should just make their own payment processor!" "Itch should use one of the payment processors that handles porn then!" Neither of these are workable, but to understand why you need a weird hybrid background in finance and tech. I happen to have such a background (as much as I loathe the time I spent in fintech). So I've been spending a lot of time trying to express that neither of these are as easy as they seem. So I'm going to centralize that here. So Who The Hell Am I? I'm a career Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). I'm a sysadmin, I'm a coder, I've had my hands in things that run the internet. I also have dual education in Computer Science and Economics (which okay, Econ isn't Business or Finance), and I spent several years working in the Financial Tech (fintech) sector. I don't anymore. I couldn't handle how awful it was anymore. Outside of the moral concerns, ever see me rant about what I call "helljob"? Fintech, baby! Video and CDNs are a lot more fun. I have been in conference calls between Visa and banks to sort out funding automation issues. I've had my hand in databases of merchant bank accounts. I've written code for POS terminals. I would consider myself in the top 1000 or so people in the world qualified to talk o...