Is there any way to set up recurring payments with the internet computer?

Developers
1

I’d like to incorporate subscriptions billed at regular intervals into my app, but at the moment, I’m unaware of any payment solutions on the internet computer that offers these features.

2 Likes
2

I haven’t used it, but I believe there is a “cronjob” feature available to canisters, which essentially allows update calls to be automatically initiated on a regular interval. I believe that feature would be the foundation of recurring payments. Hopefully someone else can shed more light.

3

Yeah, it lets you define a canister_heartbeat method that the IC will call periodically.

Although I believe it’s only available in Rust right now, and is not the most stable. It’d be great to get Motoko support at some point (there’s a pending issue).

5 Likes
4

Any update on canister_heartbeat method in motoko.
And is it stable in Rust for now?

5

You should be able to use the heartbeat in Rust or Motoko. I have live code with the heartbeat in Rust and it’s working great.

6

How’s your cycle consumption? That’s my only concern with heartbeat, since it fires really really often (and it’s up to the code to decide when to actually perform some logic).

1 Like
7

Actually I want to query call to another canister for its state, and update current canister state with the response.
This should happen periodically like polling.

I am thinking heartbeat is solution for it.
But now I am getting below error for motoko.

error [M0129], unexpected system method named heartbeat, expected preupgrade or postupgrade

Thanks

8

It would help if you provided a source code snippet.

9

It is definitely more expensive, right now it gets called every second or so.

10

For this error

error [M0129], unexpected system method named heartbeat, expected preupgrade or postupgrade
I have used snippet from example in Heartbeats :: Internet Computer

Are you asking the snippet for the error or the periodic polling?

11

I meant a snippet of your actual code that is breaking. Also what version of dfx are you using?

12

We need a public utility canister that takes the every second hit for everyone and and let’s you schedule your intervals. Some folks only need once a day. This should be standardized and daoified. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and just haven’t had the time to write it up. If someone thinks through it and writes it up we can incentivize the build with a bounty. The hardest part will be the testing to figure out how many async messages per heartbeat you can send out and building a routing mesh that scales.

One user on here wrote a pretty robust solution that is probably a good starting point.

4 Likes
13

Totally agreed. Where is that robust solution you mentioned though? If you have a link you could share, that would be great.

1 Like
14

This one has evolved a bit…not sure how far they got IC Cron - let's schedule some tasks bois - #18 by rckprtr

1 Like
15
16

You’re receiving this error because you’re using a dfx version (probably 0.8.4) that does not include a Motoko compiler that has heartbeat implemented and hence doesn’t undersand that syntax. Upgrade to a dfx that is greater than 0.9.x

17

any plans to recreate this for motoko?

18

No… for me Motoko is still to young c:

2 Likes