flatpass VS ViewForge

flatpass's answer

flatpass is built on the premise that the payment relationship belongs to you, not the platform.

Payments settle into your own Stripe account through Stripe Connect Standard. Not a platform balance you withdraw from on someone else's schedule — your account, your balance, instant settlement, no rolling reserves or minimum payout thresholds. Your customers, their payment history, and your ability to email them are yours from the first sale. Revoke the connection whenever you like and you keep every bit of it.

Everything else follows from that. The invite page is a real hosted checkout, not a bot DM — members see your tiers, pay with cards, Apple Pay, or Google Pay in their own currency, and get their role instantly. Renewals, failed payments, and cancellations are handled without you touching anything.

And because flatpass isn't processing your money, it doesn't need a cut of it. Free up to 15 paid members, then a flat monthly tier metered on community size — never a percentage of your sales, at any volume.

ViewForge's answer:

Three things. (1) Data ownership: ViewForge writes fitment as Shopify metaobjects native to your store — most competitors store fitment in their own database. (2) 8 verticals out of the box: auto, motorcycle, tractor, marine, power equipment, bicycle, printer, electronics — most competitors are automotive-only. (3) Smart Parse: extract fitment automatically from your existing product titles and descriptions instead of re-typing everything.

flatpass's answer

Discord community owners who already have an audience and are monetizing access to it — trading and investing groups, creator and fan communities, coaching and cohort programs, professional and industry servers, gaming communities with supporter tiers, and study or skills groups.

The common thread is that members are already arriving through the owner's own channels: a following, a mailing list, a podcast, an existing free server. These owners don't need discovery — they need billing and role management that doesn't scale its price with their success.

flatpass is free up to 15 paid members, so it costs nothing to start — and past that, a flat tier replaces a percentage that would otherwise grow with every sale. It's built for owners who want to keep the Stripe account, customer data, and payment relationship in their own hands rather than on a platform. EU-based, with sellers in any country Stripe supports.

ViewForge's answer:

Shopify merchants whose customers need to know whether a part fits before they will buy it — and who do not have an engineer on staff to build that themselves.

Concretely: auto and truck parts retailers, powersports and motorcycle dealers, tractor and agricultural parts sellers, marine and outboard suppliers, small-engine and power equipment stores, bicycle and e-bike component shops, printer supply merchants, and electronics accessory sellers.

Catalog sizes run from a few dozen products on the free tier up into the tens of thousands; it is running in production on a catalog of roughly 40,000 SKUs. The common thread is not the industry — it is that "does this fit my thing" is the question deciding the sale.

flatpass's answer

Your Stripe, not a platform balance. Several competitors mention Stripe, but the account is often theirs. With Stripe Connect Standard the account is yours — instant settlement, no rolling reserves, no withdrawal fees, and the customer relationship stays with you if you leave.

No API keys. flatpass authorizes through Stripe Connect Standard — an OAuth grant you approve in your own Stripe dashboard and revoke there in one click. Some Discord payment bots instead ask you to paste your Stripe secret key into their dashboard. That key is unscoped: it can charge, refund, read your entire customer list, and change payout details, and the only way to revoke it is to rotate it. Stripe's own guidance is not to share secret keys with third parties. flatpass never asks for one and has nothing of yours to leak.

A product that feels finished. A hosted invite page rather than a bot DM flow, local-currency checkout, monthly, quaterly, six-monthly or yearly billing, with multiple role tiers per server, and a public status page. Every feature is on every tier — nothing is held back for a higher plan.

ViewForge's answer:

Data ownership. Fitment lives in your Shopify metaobjects, so uninstalling does not take your compatibility data with it. Convermax, EasySearch and PartFinder all keep it in their own databases, and getting it back depends on their export tooling on the day you cancel.

Cost at the low end. The search widget, the compatibility table on the product page and the saved-vehicle garage are all on the free tier, up to 50 products, with no expiry. EasySearch puts the table and the garage behind its $75/month Premium plan. Convermax starts at $250/month.

Automotive and non-automotive coverage. Eight built-in templates, and fully custom templates from $19/month, for catalogs that do not decompose into Year/Make/Model at all.

ViewForge's answer:

ViewForge came out of agency work. Normal View was building for a parts retailer running roughly 12,000 SKUs who needed fitment search, and every app we evaluated stored the merchant's compatibility data in the vendor's own database.

That is a strange trade when you look at it directly. Fitment data is genuinely expensive to produce — it is weeks of work — and the merchant would not own the result. It would belong to whichever app happened to be installed that year.

Shopify metaobjects made a different answer possible: write fitment as native structured data inside the merchant's own store. The theme reads it, the Storefront API queries it, Admin GraphQL exports it, and it is still there after an uninstall. That decision is what the rest of the app is built around.

Everything else came from real catalogs rather than a roadmap. Eight verticals exist because a tractor catalog is not Year/Make/Model. Smart Parse exists because that retailer had already written fitment into 12,000 product titles, and nobody was ever going to retype them.

ViewForge's answer:

• TypeScript
• Shopify metaobjects, as the fitment data store
• Shopify theme app extensions for the storefront components: fitment search, saved-vehicle garage, compatibility table, product-page fit notice
• Shopify Storefront API, for querying fitment from the theme
• Shopify Admin GraphQL API, for writing and exporting fitment records
• NHTSA vehicle database, for VIN decoding
• ACES and PIES XML parsing, for automotive catalog import