Yeah I occasionally run into this. What I do right now is set up a one-off Typeform for that one payment. It's usually for $xxx or $x,xxx payments so it's worth, but not ideal.
I considered building a solution myself (quick way to receive arbitrary amounts through Stripe), but haven't come around to it yet.
If you build something that's simple and low cost (fixed monthly/annual fee) I'd consider using it.
You've got the process backwards. Like many makers by the way.
What it sounds like you're doing now is building a product, and then hoping it's something people want. That's very risky. There's a good chance you're building something nobody wants.
You want to flip your process around. Find out what people want, and then build it.
How do you find out what people want? There's many ways. Talking to potential customers is probably the easiest, although maybe scariest as well. Listening in on their conversations (e.g. on Twitter, help forums, etc) can work too. Even quickly prototyping a product and showing them can be a way to see what their needs are, but you have to be very careful not to invest too much time fine-tuning it. Don't confuse your validation prototype for your actual product.
Next time you start building something ask yourself: does the customer want this? how can I find out? how much time am I willing to risk building something nobody might want?
Take small steps. Get feedback. Iterate. Take more steps. As you develop more confidence of what the customer wants you can start taking bigger steps.
I usually start out monthly to try out the service. When I decide it's for me, I usually switch to annual so I only have to deal with one invoice rather than 12. You usually get a 17% discount as well (12 months for the price of 10) which is a nice plus.
I built my own bookkeeping app because all the other ones were too inefficient for me: #monet
A lot of it is automated. I just drop my expense PDFs into Dropbox and manually upload my bank statements. Monet then reconciles them automatically by extracting the date, vendor and amount from the PDFs (where possible) and links them to the bank statements.
Most of my revenue comes through Stripe so I can import those transactions using their API.
There's a Twitter thread detailing my development process: twitter.com/marckohlbrugge/st…
As a mostly one-man company (for WIP at least), I try to be very careful not to spread myself too thin.
There are different kind of features. For example some increase the value for existing customers (Milestone feature for WIP). Others help attract new customers (Integration with other platforms). Then there are also features that help generate more revenue from the existing customer base (Job board).
Since I'm just getting started with WIP I'm focused on features that 1) help improve value for existing customers (helping them ship) and to a lesser extend 2) attract new customers (by improving onboarding flow, etc).
Expanding horizontally with features like job boards might be interesting long term, but it's important to get the core right before building on top of it.
wip