Founders don’t like waiting. Whether it’s for an approval, a developer, and especially not for a $10,000 integration fee every time they want to add support for another payment service provider (PSP).
But as founders begin to scale, even the fastest builders are being slowed down by dependencies they can’t control. For YouPay, a gifting platform scaling into new geographies and payment methods, speed wasn’t just a preference—it’s key to survival.
So what to do? The YouPay team decided to take back their own destiny and rewire their payment stack.
“Waiting on other developers is hard,” says Clara Leigh, Technical Lead at YouPay. “I developed YouPay from the ground up, so clearly I like to ship fast, and ship well. We were sick of waiting on external factors in order to implement changes.
“Basis Theory expedited that process.”
The 10K Decision
The YouPay team set a goal in 2025 to take back more control of its payment future.
No more bottlenecks or waiting on someone else’s roadmap. And no more paying $10,000 every time YouPay wanted to add a new provider to their ecosystem—which would be once a quarter and take between four and six weeks. These costs and timelines delayed feature launches and impacted the customer experience.
They wanted to move at the pace of their own ambitions, with infrastructure that doesn’t slow them down or take a bite of their bottom line.
“As we searched, we were finding it would take months to get onboarded at other companies, which just doesn't work for someone like me who wants to ship fast,” Leigh says. “It was hard for us to stick with our previous provider when I was coding myself anyway.”
Leigh says Basis Theory was recommended by Coinflow Labs to help solve three problems:
- Time Savings: A single API could be implemented in a couple hours.
- Costs: Eliminating the $10,000 per-integration fee.
- Flexibility: Needing to support multiple PSPs and orchestrators.
“The way I see it, Basis Theory is helping us secure our financial future,” Leigh says. “Working with Basis Theory, both the team and the product, it’s quick and easy.”
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Consolidation, But in a Good Way
Through the first three quarters of 2025, Leigh explained that YouPay was managing two separate checkout experiences. Each one had different, step-by-step instructions for each, along with edge cases.
Any type of update had to go through each PSP for approval, prioritization, and eventual implementation.
Not any longer.
Leigh was able to follow the documentation at developers.basistheory.com for help implementing Elements, Proxy, 3DS, Apple Pay, and Google Pay solutions. She calls the documentation some of the best she’s seen or used.
“I tell people to go look at Basis Theory, this really is your best-selling tool,” Leigh says. “The documentation is clean, easy to understand, and this is coming from someone who does dozens of integrations. Everything other than Apple Pay took maybe 1 day, excluding front end design. Apple Pay was a little trickier because of a typo I missed. And then there was maybe a half day of work on the reactor.”
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New Year, New Goals
Leigh manages the Basis Theory integration on a daily basis. She trusts Basis Theory to not only secure the PCI details, but also to route the information to the appropriate PSP.
“Controlling our destiny is what I’ve been after for all of 2025, and now we no longer have to wait for anything,” Leigh says. “Our payments are controlled in-house, I don’t have to wait for anything I can just go do it.”
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