They don't need to master every part of software development anymore, they use Claude Fable 5, Codex, and other AI tools to build faster.

Payments are just another integration.

Most AI products are built for a global audience, not just a local market.

When you sell a product internationally, taxes, compliance requirements, and risks vary across countries, and these regulations change over time.

This is where the Merchant of Record (MoR) model comes in.

What is Merchant of Record (MoR) model?

The MoR is the entity legally responsible for processing transactions and delivering goods or services to end customers.

It manages payment acceptance, compliance, taxes, and chargebacks/refunds, allowing sellers to focus on scaling their business instead of building regulatory and financial infrastructure.

How does it work?

1. The seller sells products/services to the MoR.

2. The MoR processes customer payments, ensuring taxes, compliance, and local regulations are handled.

3. End customers purchase from the MoR.

4. The MoR pays out the net amount to the seller after deducting taxes, fees, and associated costs.

Why modern AI products need a modern MoR?

AI products are moving beyond fixed monthly subscriptions. They use prepaid credits or pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pricing based on usage.

Modern MoR platforms, like Kelviq, combine billing, usage metering, payments, taxes, compliance, payouts, and support for prepaid credits and PAYG pricing in a single platform.

Instead of building billing infrastructure and navigating global regulations, AI companies can report customer usage, while the MoR handles the rest.

As AI makes it easier to build products, MoR will become the essential infrastructure for selling globally.

The idea was simple:

Give users unrestricted access for a limited time. If they experience the product's value, many would convert into paying customers.

But, there is another side to it.

When users don't add a payment method during the trial, the chances of churn increase significantly. Many enjoy the trial and simply disappear once it ends.

Still, for many products, offering a free trial without requiring a credit card still makes sense. It reduces friction and encourages more people to experience the product.

Now, with the rise of AI products, the model is evolving again.

Instead of offering free trials, many AI products provide free credits. Users can explore the product based on usage rather than time.

So, does a free trial still matter?

Without a free trial, users often create an account because it's free. But they never actually use the product. Their free credits remain untouched. They never experience the value you're trying to deliver.

A free trial creates urgency.

It encourages users to actively explore the product and discover its value. The expiry date also gives builders a natural opportunity to engage with users, gather feedback, understand their needs, and ultimately convert them into paying customers.

So the best approach depends on your product.

1. Traditional SaaS may benefit from time-based free trials.
2. AI products often fit usage-based credits.
3. Some products can combine both for better activation and conversion.

At Kelviq, we support both models, so you can choose the one that fits your business or combine them to maximize conversions.

For B2C, tax-inclusive pricing generally leads to higher conversions.

Consumers care about the total price they pay. Seeing a higher price at checkout because tax was added can reduce trust. It can also lead to more abandoned carts.

For B2B, tax-exclusive pricing is often preferred.

Businesses can often recover VAT/GST as input tax. The tax is mainly an accounting item, not part of the actual cost. They also expect the base price and tax to be shown separately.

What if you sell to both B2C and B2B customers?

How do you maximize conversions without maintaining separate pricing for each audience?

The same question led us to add Tax Behavior Settings in Kelviq

Merchants can configure how prices are displayed and calculated for B2C and B2B customers, making it easier to optimize the buying experience while staying compliant with tax rules.

We learned there is no single right way to display taxes.

B2C merchants often optimize for a frictionless buying experience.

B2B merchants often optimize for accounting clarity.

After all, conversions should be the ultimate goal for every pricing strategy.

Customers purchase credits, and each AI request consumes credits based on usage.

It's a simple model, but the real challenge lies in how those credits expire.

For example, imagine a company that:

1. Gives users a small number of free credits every day. (5 credits/day)

2. Resets purchased credits on a monthly billing cycle. (100 credits/month)

Why offer daily free credits?

It's not just generosity, it's psychology.

If users exhaust all their credits, they may start exploring other AI tools, increasing the risk of churn.

Daily free credits encourage users to return regularly, explore new ideas, and continue using the platform.

Once they are engaged in a workflow, they are also more likely to purchase additional credits if needed.

But there is another side to the story.

Many users feel frustrated when their purchased credits expire before they can use them.

It creates a sense of FOMO, and sometimes they end up spending credits on tasks that provide little or no value, just to avoid "wasting" them.

Is that really a good user experience?

This is where credit rollover becomes valuable.

Instead of letting unused credits disappear, businesses can allow a configurable portion of them to roll over into the next billing cycle.

This gives customers more flexibility while still allowing companies to maintain a sustainable business model.

This is exactly how we designed Kelviq.

With Kelviq, AI companies can:

1. Configure how many unused credits can roll over to the next cycle.

2. Define rollover policies that fit their pricing strategy.

3. Notify customers before they are about to run out of credits using configurable usage thresholds.

At the end of the day, customer retention improves when people feel they are getting the maximum value from every credit they purchase, not when they are racing against an expiration date.

But it had to be genuinely useful for our business, not just another toy app for managing tasks.

Today, our Kelviq vetting system runs entirely on OpenClaw, handling initial screening and speeding up customer onboarding.

The Problem:
After launch, we started getting a surge of requests for business verification. Business verification is mandatory for us, as we operate an MoR platform. So every time a profile was submitted, we had to dive deep into the business to decide on approval. It was consuming a massive amount of time, causing constant context switching, and leaving us drained (especially when the outcome had to be a rejection).

So, we decided to automate it.

The Solution:
1. A profile is submitted, triggering a message to Discord that tags our Kelviq bot.
2. Our OpenClaw server picks up the request.
3. The AI agent analyzes the website, compares it against our policies, and makes a decision.

The bot instantly outputs an approval or rejection, a detailed reasoning statement, the appropriate category, and a confidence score.

The Flow:
User input (URL) → Kelviq Backend → Discord → OpenClaw Agent → Web Scraping → Policy Check → VERDICT.

The Stack:
– OpenClaw image deployed on a DigitalOcean
– OpenRouter subscription
– Discord for messaging

Here is the video + story behind building this over a weekend.

https://x.com/geojacobm6/status/2034127028329583111

Hope this is helpful! And happy to share more details if anyone’s building something similar.

Are you using custom domain in hashnode to show your posts?

If your answer is Yes, then this post is for you.

Is your intention to show your posts on hashnode on a custom domain with www and a root domain(like www.thebiggtalks.com and thebiggtalks.com) over SSL (https).

How I ended up writing this post

A few days back, when i tried to configure my domain in hashnode, i noticed that, something is broken. Either one of the https://www.thebiggtalks.com or https://thebiggtalks.com will work. But if I call http://www.thebiggtalks.com or http://thebiggtalks.com, then both will be redirecting to right endpoint. So I started looking at other blogs in hashnode which use custom domains, then I realized that most of them are facing similar issue.

After reconfiguring multiple times, i was able to serve my blog over both www and root domain, where one will be redirecting to the right domain configured in hashnode.

So here I want to share my configuration which i used, so that everyone can benefit out of it.

I'm using Google Domains as a domain name registrar; later we can see how we can achieve it in Godaddy or any other similar platforms. And there is a difference in configurations w.r.t Google domains vs Godaddy or other platforms, so the below google domain configuration might not work for other platforms, if you are not using google domains, you can directly jump to Godaddy configuration which will be similar to other platforms like namecheap, cloudflare, synergywholesale etc.

Configuration in Google Domains

Here the hashnode configuration is thebiggtalks.com

1. Configure the A record as show in screenshot.

2. Configure the Forwarding as shown below.

You are done, wait for sometime and start accessing your endpoint and verify it is working.

Configuration in Godaddy

Here the hashnode configuration is www.thebiggtalks.com

1. Configure the A record as show in screenshot.

2. Configure CNAME record.

3. Configure the Forwarding, here select domain or subdomain depending on your requirement to forward. I'm selecting Forward domain to achieve the same which i showed above.

You are done, wait for sometime and start accessing your endpoint and verify it is working.

Configuration in Namecheap

Here the hashnode configuration is www.thebiggtalks.com

1. Configure the A record and CNAME as show in screenshot.

Similarly, you can configure the same if you are using a different domain name registrar other than Google domains/Namecheap/Godaddy. I have tried only with these 3 platforms.

Before we conclude, Key points to keep in mind

The below points can be followed for any DNS portals.

1. Always add A record and CNAME record in DNS management portal.
2. Add a redirection from root domain to subdomain (http) in the portal.
3. Then create root domain/subdomain in hashnode. If that didn't work try creating and deleting multiple times in hashnode.
4. Better to configure subdomain in hashnode. Because from my personal experience I have faced sometimes subdomains are not properly redirecting to root domains in some portals. So always configure subdomain in hashnode and do a redirection from root domain to subdomain.

A few other resources which may help you to configure custom domains:

1. https://support.hashnode.com/docs/mapping-domain
2. https://hashnode.com/post/how-to-set-up-a-custom-domain-on-devblog-cjvoymax9001u8xs1i9f3077e

Thanks for reading, please share it within your network, if this resonates with you.

You can also connect with me on twitter as I will be inscribing my thoughts there very frequently.

Things To Be Taken Care Before Entering To Freelancing World

1. Default requirement as always: Be focused and achieve good knowledge about what you are going to deliver to the client. How do I do that?. No worries, we will discuss it below.

2. Be active on community forums. (I have subscribed to django user groups and have been continuously reading emails coming to the group in my initial time) This literally helped me to understand the problems faced by other developers. Now a days Discord is one of the best tool getting popular for these.

3. Focus on a single skill while submitting a proposal for a project (Initially I was focusing only on Python/Django projects) as i was experienced in creating web applications using python and django framework.

4. Use Github to showcase your expertise, and how much you are passionate about what you are doing. Create some sample applications and start contributing to open source projects regularly. Contributing to open source will surely increase your knowledge and network.

5. Be active on stackoverflow.com, Earn reputations by asking and answering questions. Literally I was filtering the tags #django and #python on stackoverflow.com and kept on refreshing the browser to answer the next immediate question. It really helped me to increase my knowledge as a developer.

6. Submit your proposal with less price/no cost. Initially focus only on good reviews from clients; money will follow you once you start delivering quality work.

7. Be ready to spend a few hours a day continuously and submit your proposal immediately when it gets listed on the platform. As a beginner, I was spending hours on Upwork to get my first project.

8. Always include your Github and stackoverflow.com profile while submitting the project proposal. This actually increased my chances of getting the project.

Special Tricks For Beginners:

1. Try to apply for projects listed on new freelancing platforms, as there will be less competitors while applying for a project.

2. Always ask the customer to provide some reviews after successfully delivering the project, but don't force them.

3. Make sure to switch on the notification on mobile/web and reply to messages whenever client asks something. Delaying reply, may lose your chance.

4. Finally, the important one is, whenever you learn new skills, showcase it always. Github is one of the best place.

How To Achieve A Long Term Client:

1. Being irreplaceable is the best strategy to follow while working on a project.

2. Put all your valuable time into understanding the project.

3. Don't leave your client because of the complexity of work.

Follow these steps, clients will face difficulty in finding you a replacement and as an outcome you'll surely earn a long term client.

Thanks for reading, please share it within your network, if this resonates with you.

You can also connect with me on twitter as I will be inscribing my thoughts there very frequently.

1. Are you the same person looking into stackoverflow.com when you are stuck somewhere or ready to help someone on your free time.

2. Why would someone help you with answers without any benefit, as they might have spent hours to solve the same problem which you have faced. Have you ever thought about these?

Stack Overflow Benefits

There are lot of direct benefits by using stackoverflow.com. Those are well visible on the portal as:

• QnA thread
• Jobs
• Teams
• Collectives
• Learnings
• Reputations
• Badges etc.

But do you see the possibility of using your stackoverflow.com profile from a marketing view point?

Right, let's come to the real part.

There are numerous possibilities for developers to make money online, some of them are:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Blogging
• Info Products
• Micro Startups
• Freelancing
• Online courses etc.

All these are good, but Freelancing is one of the great opportunities. But the main problem is where/how to find the clients? And now that is solved by lots of freelancing portals such as:

• Upwork
• Freelancer
• Codementor
• Toptal
• PeoplePerHour etc.

Now the biggest problem is how will you get the projects which are listed on those freelancing platforms. People think that, as a beginner to the freelancing world it is difficult to get their first project. But indeed it is not if you are moving on the right path. There are a lot of tactics to get your first project; one of them is, using stackoverflow.com profiles to market yourself while submitting your proposals. This is literally a successful approach from my experience.

Let's Have A Closer Look

In the past, I started my career around 2013, and I was very active on stackoverflow.com at the end of 2014 or early 2015 time frame. Soon I became addicted to it and kept searching for my favorite tag "django" and trying to answer all the questions daily. It really helped me to increase my knowledge as a developer, and it went well for a period of time. As an added advantage, I also earned 1000+ reputations there within a short span.

Then around 2 years later, I thought about making some extra income while working, and started exploring freelancing opportunities. So I have opened an account on Upwork and started applying to projects. But I understand that no one will look into my profile, as I'm saying, I have only 2.5 years of experience even though I'm confident to fulfill my clients requirements (I used to always submit proposals for building an application from scratch). A few days passed like that, and then I realized no one would trust me until they saw my work or how passionate I was. So I started putting my stackoverflow.com profile link on the cover letter and started submitting the proposals. Suddenly I started seeing some good results. I'm getting invitations to interview and finally end up winning my first project. This approach I have continued for quite some time, until I get enough reviews from my clients on Upwork..

Note: Once you have enough good reviews from clients, its much easier to get the new projects.

A sample cover letter, which helped me to get my first contract on Upwork..

There are a lot more things you need to consider while submitting the proposal for a project. As our intention for the post is different, I will write those in a different post.

Thanks for reading, please share it within your network, if this resonates with you.

You can also connect with me on twitter as I will be inscribing my thoughts there very frequently.