Crypto automatic billing

If you use Netflix, have a health insurance, go to the gym or simply bought something in terms you know that it is incredibly common to authorise companies to charge you the agreed amount automatically in your bank account without having to do a manual transaction every month for each service you hired.

Unfortunately, if you want to pay for something in crypto (let's say an ENS domain) you must remember to manually send a transaction when the next payment is due. And yes: this can itself be beneficial (no one wants to pay for things that are not being used), but as more cool crypto-friendly services appear, more manual payments we have to send (and remember!)

What do we want to do & how it works

In a nutshell: we want to enable the next generation of crypto payments.

Our plan is to make it extremely easy for both users and companies to exchange money for services, without having to rely on monthly (or whatever time period) manual transfers.

Using our solution, when you want to make a recurrent payment to a company, you will just login into Autobill - temporary name till we find something better :) -, generate a billing token and send it to the company you want to pay to via Autobill. Also, you will have to deposit an amount to be able to take care of the payments you want to generate (just like in a regular bank account!)

The company you sent the token to will be able to use it in Autobill and automatically receive the authorized recurring payments as long as the billing token is valid and funds are available.

Obviously, our plan is to make this process as easy and painless as possible for both parties, allowing this entire process to happen via API so that the companies can prompt you to generate the tokens within the purchasing process, and retrieve them automatically to verify that they can start providing the service for you.

Also, for us it is paramount that the user has the entire control of the billing tokens, so a dashboard will be available for users to revoke authorizations at any time to make sure they are paying only for what they are using (bonus points: you can not only make your life easier, but also make it super simple to see at a glance what you are paying for!)

Current status & next steps

After doing the initial necessary research we are working on designing a first version of the protocol. Our objective now is to create a first working MVP in a testnet environment so that we can prove the benefits of the proposed solution, so all the funds that we are granted with this round will be assigned to that mission.

Why an ENS grant?

We believe that ENS domains are a critical piece of the Ethereum infrastructure in order to help identify both individuals and companies. Using ENS domains is a key part in Autobill's solution as we are taking special care when it comes to transparency and control (the user needs to easily recognize who is authorizing)

For example: imagine that you want to automatically renew your .eth domains. It is way easier for you to verify that the address you are authorizing to bill you is ens.eth rather than having to manually check a non-human readable address. Obviously it is not the only safety mesure we will rely on, but making things easy to read for humans (including the non tech savvy) is a great step towards mass adoption of crypto.

Also, we feel that going for a grant in this early stage enables us have more freedom in designing the roadmap of the product, allowing for the community to shape the future of Autobill with us, rather than depend on VC's to do so.

(and also, every ENS domain holder would benefit from Autobill for the renewals!)