Developers who need to integrate subscriptions still rely on traditional payment systems: high fees, bank accounts, and week-long waits before the first payout.

Crypto fixes that, but recurring payments remain painful.
Integrating smart contracts means manually executing charges or building complex infrastructure to automate them.

Couch is the missing companion to Base Subscriptions, enabling developers to integrate recurring stablecoin billing in minutes with just a few lines of code

1. Blockchain Infrastructure as Code

Challenge: Handling subscriptions and payments requires strong security and reliability practices. We wanted to manage onchain resources with the same discipline as the rest of our stack — through Infrastructure as Code (IaC). While Coinbase CDP offers great wallet infrastructure, there was no way to provision wallets declaratively, like servers or databases.

Solution: We contributed the first onchain provider to Alchemy
. Think of it as Terraform for onchain resources. It let us securely bind wallets to our Couch infrastructure and orchestrate addresses directly from code.

Outcome: The PR, reviewed with help from a Base engineer, has since shipped — enabling other builders to automate wallet provisioning and move faster.

2. Reliability

Challenge: The recent AWS outage impacted Coinbase infrastructure, where the Coinbase bundler struggled to route through degraded RPC nodes, causing severe service disruption.

Solution: We used the outage as a chance to test Couch’s reliability. During investigation, we found and fixed bugs in how failed payments were handled from Coinbase’s upstream services. We also improved error handling and made our retry and backoff logic more robust.

Outcome: After these fixes, all test subscriptions in staging stayed active throughout the outage. Couch was able to self-heal and recover automatically, proving the reliability improvements under real-world stress.

https://github.com/couchlabs/couch

https://couch-playground-staging-website.nb.workers.dev/checkout-instructions

Today, there’s no off-the-shelf way for developers to easily offer recurring payments on Base. To accept Base Subscriptions, they must build their own offchain infrastructure before they can even charge a single user.

Couch is the missing companion to Base Subscriptions. It handles the entire recurring billing flow so builders can go live in minutes instead of weeks, without managing any backend infrastructure.

Our alpha validates this: we integrated recurring stablecoin billing with just a few lines of code and reached successful test transactions in under ten minutes.

Without Couch:

• Manual contract calls every billing cycle
• Custom schedulers for renewals
• Dunning logic to handle failed payments
• Webhooks to grant or revoke user access

With Couch:

• All the benefits with few lines of codes

As a stretch experiment (see demo video), we built a platform/delegation API that lets third-party platforms create solutions on top of Couch. Using it, we quickly built a permissionless checkout system that allows any merchant to accept subscriptions by simply sharing a link — no account, no code.

Example:

checkout?beneficiary=0x123&amount=9.99&period=30

This experiment validated Couch as a developer platform, showing how other developers can build new products and features on top of it.

With Couch, teams can focus on their product and customers — not the plumbing required to accept stablecoin subscriptions.

Builders on base that want to offer Base Subscriptions,

• Stripe (they offer stablecoin susbcription) , doesn't currently work with spendpermission/base , still require bank account, and still require 7-14 days before first payout.
• Polar.sh (they offer credit card subscription but not stablecoin subscriptions)
• Crossmint (they offer various stablecoin and credit card payments, but not subscriptions)