Building receipt verification yourself

Should I build Ethiopian payment verification myself?

For one provider, probably yes. A telebirr receipt is an HTML page with the fields in it, and a working fetcher and parser is an afternoon of work with no ongoing cost. The reason people stop is that the second provider is not like the first, and the seventeenth is not like any of them: different hosts, different formats, some HTML, some JSON, some PDF, some behind a QR code, some bilingual, one that needs a second identifier the customer usually does not send. They also change without warning, and a parser that breaks silently returns a wrong amount rather than an error, which is worse than being down.

The case for building it yourself

  • For a single provider it is genuinely small, and you keep full control of it.
  • No dependency, no bill, no third party seeing your customers’ references.
  • Open-source starting points exist for the common providers, so you are not starting from nothing.

Side by side

 building it yourselflinks.et
One providerAn afternoon. Reasonable.Also works, but not obviously worth a dependency.
Seventeen providersSeventeen fetchers and parsers across HTML, JSON, PDF and QR, each with its own quirks.One call, one response shape.
When a bank changes its formatYou find out from a customer. A silent parse failure returns a wrong figure.Handled upstream, with the change landing for everyone at once.
Reaching the banksSeveral Ethiopian receipt hosts are unreliable or unreachable from outside the country, which is an infrastructure problem before it is a code problem.Fetched over an Ethiopian egress link, with per-host status published.
ScreenshotsA separate problem again: reading a reference out of an image.Included, and chained into the same lookup.

When not to use links.et

If you only ever take telebirr, build it. It is a small, well-understood job and you will not regret owning it. Come back when you add a second provider, which is where the cost stops being linear.

Try it before you decide

Paste a real receipt link or reference and see what comes back. No account needed.

Verify a paymentSee pricing

Other comparisons

Checking payments by hand, or with an APIOpening every receipt link yourself is free and works. Where it stops working, and what the alternative actually costs.A payment gateway, or receipt verificationA gateway collects the money. Verification confirms money that already moved. They solve different problems, and most Ethiopian sellers need the second one.