Spenny Piggy

A UK platform where fans back creators through wishlist items, memberships, exclusive content, paid tasks and group Piggy Pots. Money arrives through Stripe Connect, sits under a risk and reserve regime while it clears, and pays out to creators every Friday.

Creator payouts are the hard half of a creator platform. Money has to clear, survive chargebacks, respect a reserve, and still arrive predictably, while every new creator has to be identity-checked and moderated before they can take a payment at all. Doing that manually does not scale past the first few hundred creators.

• Take money for five different product types through one payment path
• Hold funds under a risk and reserve regime without confusing the creator about what they are owed
• Move creator approval from six disconnected screens to one decision
• Keep a public app and an internal admin in step while they share one database

Two Laravel 10 applications, an Inertia and React 18 public platform and a separate admin console, deployed on Laravel Vapor and sharing a single database. Stripe Connect Express handles onboarding, Checkout takes payment, and Identity plus Radar carry verification and fraud. Money moves through explicit states, clearing on a seven-day hold, reserve held, pending delivery, then a Friday payout, so a creator can always see which stage every pound is at. Uploadcare with Rekognition moderates uploads before a human sees them.

• Creator approval became a single decision instead of six screens
• Creators can see which stage every pound is at, rather than asking support
• Moderation runs automatically before anything reaches a human reviewer

When money sits in stages, name the stages in the interface. Most payout support tickets are not about the amount, they are about not knowing where it is.