
Ask HN: Why there's not a “better dashboard app” built on top of PayPal API? - fiatjaf
Paypal dashboard for developers (I mean apps using the Paypal API to collect payments automatically, but you get this confusion, it is because Paypal is confusing) is very bad.<p>It is limited, it is kinda slow, the session expires in a few minutes, it doesn&#x27;t show all the data it could show, it doesn&#x27;t allow you to perform actions manually or use it in any practical way besides setting an &quot;app&quot; and getting API keys.<p>At the same time, Stripe has a dashboard that has all these features and probably more. It is a pleasure to use (for sandbox testing, first-time implementers and for small apps with low revenue, at least). Also, there are services like Baremetrics that add features to these.<p>The question is: why not build an app that accepts Paypal token and secret and makes all the needed API calls automatically to display a nicer and friendlier dashboard for developers?<p>It sounds like a thing that should and could be done, but for some reason I can&#x27;t find anything about this, not even someone suggesting it, on Google. Why is that? Am I missing something pretty obvious here?<p>(I&#x27;m not missing the fact that some people wouldn&#x27;t handle their API secrets to a third-party service, because we know some would, and that&#x27;s not bad, you&#x27;re already trusting Paypal with your money, and probably others with even more valuable things -- but, if this is really a serious issue, this app could be an open source client-side app that runs locally, it doesn&#x27;t need to be SaaS.)
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fiatjaf
For people not getting how bad the Paypal dashboard is, here's an anedoctal
example of its badness in action:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27276797/paypal-show-
sand...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27276797/paypal-show-sandbox-
transactions)

(But I would also like to say that the dashboard is in fact getting better
recently, along with the REST API and its documentation.)

