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 .