Creator Economy: How to Manage Royalties, Payouts, and Subscriptions with Rapyd

[drew.harris]

By: Gourav Bais

The creator economy is all about the creation, collection, distribution, and monetization of content, skills, or products. Today’s creators—whether YouTubers, streamers, educators, or musicians—are entrepreneurs. And behind every piece of digital content, there’s usually an overlooked task: managing payments.

Creators have to juggle multiple income streams, including ad revenue, brand deals, subscriptions, affiliate commissions, digital product sales, brand partnerships, and direct fan contributions. Managing this mix means dealing with royalties, fluctuating transaction fees, and cross-border payouts. Creators need a payment system that simplifies operations, supports global subscriptions, and makes it easy to pay collaborators and affiliates.

In this article, you’ll learn how Rapyd can help creators manage payments, receive international transactions, and simplify financial operations.

Core Payment Requirements in the Creator Economy

Managing payments isn’t just about moving money from point A to B; it’s also about how the transfer happens: the speed, cost, currency, compliance, and overall user experience. Let’s take a look at the core payment requirements that define how financial transactions work in the creator economy.

Royalty Payments

Royalty payments can be complicated for creators collaborating on podcasts, music, or shared ad revenue. One of the biggest challenges is tracking revenue sources across platforms and ensuring everyone gets their fair share. Delays or errors in royalty distribution can damage trust and often lead to disputes when multiple parties are involved across various locations.

Clear, reliable royalty payments are key to maintaining long-term partnerships.

Affiliate Payouts

Affiliate marketing allows influencers and creators to earn commissions by promoting products or services—but managing multiple affiliates with varying rates, performance metrics, and payout schedules is tricky. Tracking earnings and calculating variable commissions based on clicks, sales, and engagement can also become increasingly difficult at scale.

To keep up, creators need tools that can not only automate payment calculations but also scale seamlessly as the affiliate networks expand.

Subscription Management

Subscriptions provide a steady stream of income and build a loyal community. But handling subscription-based businesses is often challenging, especially when it comes to handling recurring payments and renewals across different regions and currencies.

Subscriptions can also have multiple tiers, and each tier can have its own pricing, benefits, and audience. Managing these tiers requires a flexible system that can accommodate upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and trial periods without disrupting the user experience.

Benefits of Using Rapyd APIs for Creator Payment Systems

Rapyd’s suite of APIs provides the necessary infrastructure to scale payments efficiently, securely, and globally. It simplifies complex creator payment workflows by providing the following:

• Simplified integration for complex payment flows: With a few lines of code, developers can integrate revenue sharing, automate payouts, and manage subscription billing, all within a single platform.
• Support for global payouts in multiple currencies: Rapyd supports payouts to over 190 countries in more than 70 currencies. This helps creators send and receive payments globally without dealing with separate banking integrations or third-party processors.
• Enhanced security with tokenization and PCI compliance: Rapyd provides security features like end-to-end tokenization, and sensitive data like card details is never stored on your servers. It also offers built-in PCI DSS compliance, helping platforms meet regulatory requirements.

Implementing a Creator Payment System with the Rapyd API

In this walkthrough, you’ll learn how to build a basic creator payment system using Rapyd’s API—covering royalties, affiliate payouts, and subscription management. We’ll use Python and FastAPI to bring it all together.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, you’ll need the following prerequisites:

• A free Rapyd sandbox account. After registering, go to the Developers section to find your access key and secret key—you’ll need these to access Rapyd’s APIs.
  
  
• Python 3.8+ installed on your system.
• The FastAPI, uvicorn, Requests, and python-dotenv libraries. You can install these with the following command:

  pip install fastapi uvicorn requests python-dotenv
  

You’ll also need to create a folder to store all your scripts and files. You can name it something like creator_economy_rapyd_implementation.

Create a Rapyd Authentication File

Rapyd requires authentication to use its services. It’s recommended that you use a .env file to store all your credentials.

Create a .env file inside your project folder and write the following lines of code, replacing your_access_key_here and your_secret_key_here with your actual credentials:

RAPYD_ACCESS_KEY=your_access_key_here
RAPYD_SECRET_KEY=your_secret_key_here

Create another file named rapyd_utils.py inside the same folder and import the necessary Python libraries:

import os
import time
import json
import hmac
import base64
import hashlib
import requests
from dotenv import load_dotenv

Once the libraries are imported, load the environment variables mentioned in the .env file:

load_dotenv()

Then, load the Rapyd credentials and define the Rapyd URL you’ll use to access their services:

access_key = os.getenv("RAPYD_ACCESS_KEY")
secret_key = os.getenv("RAPYD_SECRET_KEY")
base_url = "https://sandboxapi.rapyd.net"

Once you’ve loaded your Rapyd credentials, it’s time to implement Rapyd authentication with the following lines of code:

def generate_signature(http_method, url_path, salt, timestamp, body=''):
    body_str = json.dumps(body, separators=(',', ':')) if body else ''
    to_sign = f'{http_method}{url_path}{salt}{timestamp}{access_key}{secret_key}{body_str}'
    h = hmac.new(secret_key.encode(), to_sign.encode(), hashlib.sha256)
    return base64.b64encode(h.digest()).decode()

This function generates a signature to validate each request made to Rapyd’s API. To ensure the request is coming from a validated source, Rapyd needs each request to be signed using HMAC-SHA256. This code uses the following variables:

• url_path: The endpoint being called, like /v1/account/transfer.
• salt: A randomly generated string to prevent replay attacks.
• timestamp: The current UNIX timestamp to ensure freshness.
• body: An optional request body for POST and PUT methods.

Next, define a function named make_rapyd_request that will help you call various Rapyd services:

def make_rapyd_request(method, path, body=None):
    salt = os.urandom(12).hex()
    timestamp = str(int(time.time()))
    signature = generate_signature(method, path, salt, timestamp, body)

    headers = {
        "access_key": access_key,
        "salt": salt,
        "timestamp": timestamp,
        "signature": signature,
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }

    response = requests.request(method, base_url + path, headers=headers, json=body)
    return response.json()

This code can be broken down into the following components:

• It first creates a 12-byte random value (salt) to ensure uniqueness.
• It then generates a timestamp to prevent replay attacks.
• generate_signature() combines the HTTP method, path, salt, timestamp, and body to create a secure signature for authentication.
• The code sets up the request headers, including authentication and content type.
• It executes the HTTP request using the HTTP method and endpoint.
• Finally, the code parses the server’s response into JSON.

That’s all you need to do to make a request to Rapyd endpoints.

Create an Rapyd API App

Once the Rapyd utility script is ready, it’s time to implement the main functionalities of a creator economy payment system.

To start, you need to create main.py inside your project folder. Your folder structure should look like this:

creator_economy_rapyd_implementation/
│
├── main.py
├── rapyd_utils.py
└── .env

Import the necessary Python libraries as well as the FastAPI library for creating different payment facility endpoints:

from fastapi import FastAPI
from pydantic import BaseModel
from typing import List
from rapyd_utils import make_rapyd_request

app = FastAPI()

Then, write the different data models that define and validate the expected JSON input for the endpoints:

# ---------- MODELS ----------
class Collaborator(BaseModel):
    name: str
    wallet_id: str
    share: float

class RoyaltyRequest(BaseModel):
    creator_wallet_id: str
    total_revenue: float
    collaborators: List[Collaborator]

class AffiliateRequest(BaseModel):
    affiliate_wallet_id: str
    commission_amount: float
    sender_wallet_id: str

class SubscriptionRequest(BaseModel):
    customer_email: str
    amount: float
    interval: str = "monthly"

Four different data models are defined: Collaborator defines an individual involved in royalty revenue sharing, and the remaining three data models define and validate the payment facilities in the creator economy app.

Royalty Payments

Royalty payments are often recurring and variable, and they need to be distributed across multiple parties. To handle this efficiently, you need to build a system that supports accurate and timely royalty disbursements.

In this section, you’ll learn how to implement the first endpoint of the application for royalty payments. This is the foundation for handling complex, multiparty creator compensation.

Add the following endpoint to your FastAPI application inside the main.py file. This endpoint takes a list of collaborators and their revenue share, calculates each payout, and initiates the transfer to each collaborator:

@app.post("/royalty-payments")
def distribute_royalties(data: RoyaltyRequest):
    results = []
    for collab in data.collaborators:
        payout_amount = round(data.total_revenue * collab.share, 2)
        body = {
            "beneficiary": {"ewallet": collab.wallet_id},
            "amount": payout_amount,
            "currency": "USD",
            "sender": {"ewallet": data.creator_wallet_id},
            "metadata": {"type": "royalty"}
        }
        res = make_rapyd_request("POST", "/v1/account/transfer", body)
        results.append({
            "name": collab.name,
            "amount": payout_amount,
            "status": res.get("status", "FAILED")
        })
    return {"payouts": results}

This code uses the following variables:

• data.collaborators calculates how much each collaborator should receive.
• round(..., 2) rounds off the obtained value up to two decimal points.
• beneficiary represents who gets the money.
• sender is the creator paying the beneficiary.
• metadata is an optional tag to label this as a royalty payout.
• make_rapyd_request calls the Rapyd API to perform the transfer and returns a list of each collaborator, their payout, and the API status.

This endpoint is designed to split the revenue among multiple collaborators based on predefined share percentages. Once the request is received, including the creator’s wallet ID, total revenue amount, and a list of collaborators, it calculates the payout amount by multiplying the total revenue by their share. The revenue is then rounded off to two decimal places for currency precision, and a JSON body is prepared that includes the sender and receiver wallet IDs, amount, currency, and metadata, indicating this is a “royalty” type of transfer. Finally, it makes a POST request to the Rapyd /v1/account/transfer endpoint for each collaborator using the make_rapyd_request function.

Affiliate Payouts

Now, let’s implement an endpoint that pays a single affiliate based on the provided data:

@app.post("/affiliate-payout")
def process_affiliate_payout(data: AffiliateRequest):
    body = {
        "beneficiary": {"ewallet": data.affiliate_wallet_id},
        "amount": data.commission_amount,
        "currency": "USD",
        "sender": {"ewallet": data.sender_wallet_id},
        "metadata": {"type": "affiliate_commission"}
    }
    res = make_rapyd_request("POST", "/v1/account/transfer", body)
    return res

The body{...} variable is almost identical to the one in the /royalty-payments endpoint, but with different metadata. make_rapyd_request() performs and returns the result of the payout.

This endpoint accepts a JSON payload containing the affiliate’s wallet ID, commission amount, and sender’s wallet ID. It then constructs a body similar to the previous endpoint, defining the beneficiary, sender, currency, and amount, and tags the metadata with affiliate_commission. Finally, it makes a POST request to Rapyd’s /v1/account/transfer endpoint to transfer the commission from the sender’s wallet to the affiliate’s.

Managing Subscriptions

Finally, let’s implement the last endpoint for managing subscriptions. This endpoint implements a hosted payment link via Rapyd’s /v1/payment_links API:

@app.post("/create-subscription")
def create_subscription(data: SubscriptionRequest):
    body = {
        "amount": data.amount,
        "currency": "USD",
        "customer": {
            "email": data.customer_email
        },
        "interval": data.interval,
        "metadata": {
                "subscription_tier": "premium"
        }
    }
    res = make_rapyd_request("POST", "/v1/payment_links", body)
    return {
            "redirect_url": res.get("data", {}).get("redirect_url", None)
    }

The following variables are used:

• interval, which defines recurring subscriptions
• metadata, which can be used to track tiers (basic, premium, etc.)
• make_rapyd_request, which returns a redirect URL that the frontend or customer can use to pay

This endpoint accepts the customer’s email, the subscription amount, and the payment interval. Then, it builds a request body that includes the amount, currency, customer details, subscription interval, and optional metadata like the tier name (“premium”). Finally, the body is sent to Rapyd’s /v1/payment_links endpoint, which generates a hosted link that customers can visit to complete the subscription setup.

Run the Application

Once you’ve written the code, all you have to do is run the FastAPI app using uvicorn to access different endpoints. To do so, open your terminal and run the following command:

uvicorn main:app --reload

This starts your FastAPI application, which can be accessed on http://localhost:8000/docs:

You can also use curl commands to call the following endpoints: /royalty-payments, /affiliate-payout, and /create-subscription.

/royalty-payments

This endpoint splits and distributes revenue among collaborators based on their share. To do this, you need to obtain a wallet ID (such as ewallet_creator_123) from Rapyd. Every payment in the application—whether a royalty payout, affiliate commission, or subscription—depends on Rapyd Wallets, also known as ewallets.

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/royalty-payments \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "creator_wallet_id": "ewallet_creator_123",
  "total_revenue": 1000,
  "collaborators": [
    {
      "name": "Alice",
      "wallet_id": "ewallet_alice_001",
      "share": 0.5
    },
    {
      "name": "Bob",
      "wallet_id": "ewallet_bob_002",
      "share": 0.3
    },
    {
      "name": "Charlie",
      "wallet_id": "ewallet_charlie_003",
      "share": 0.2
    }
  ]
}'

Your output will look like this:

{
  "payouts": [
    {
      "name": "Alice",
      "amount": 500.0,
      "status": "SUCCESS"
    },
    {
      "name": "Bob",
      "amount": 300.0,
      "status": "SUCCESS"
    },
    {
      "name": "Charlie",
      "amount": 200.0,
      "status": "SUCCESS"
    }
  ]
}

The endpoint splits $1,000 USD in revenue into 50 percent, 30 percent, and 20 percent shares for Alice, Bob, and Charlie, respectively. Then, it initiates Rapyd transfers for each. The response confirms the transfer status for each payout.

/affiliate-payout

This endpoint pays a commission to an affiliate:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/affiliate-payout \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "affiliate_wallet_id": "ewallet_aff_007",
  "commission_amount": 120,
  "sender_wallet_id": "ewallet_creator_123"
}'

Your output will look something like this:

{
  "status": {
    "status": "SUCCESS",
    "message": "",
    "error_code": "",
    "response_code": "",
    "operation_id": "e4bc3f56-d40b-4cb4-a9e1-e5d18fc77b8e"
  },
  "data": {
    "id": "transfer_abc123xyz",
    "amount": 120,
    "currency": "USD",
    "status": "ACT",
    "beneficiary": {
      "ewallet": "ewallet_aff_007"
    }
  }
}

This endpoint transfers $120 USD from the creator’s wallet to the affiliate’s wallet. The operation_id can be stored for logging or future reconciliation.

/create-subscription

This endpoint creates a payment link for a customer to subscribe:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8000/create-subscription \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "customer_email": "subscriber@example.com",
  "amount": 15.99,
  "interval": "monthly"
}'

Your output will look something like this:

{
  "redirect_url": "https://sandboxcheckout.rapyd.net?token=pl_8fc456a83e"
}

This creates a hosted payment link. Once you click the URL, you’ll be taken to a Rapyd-hosted checkout page where you can securely complete the subscription process using your preferred payment method.

The API call allows customers to subscribe to a monthly plan priced at $15.99 USD. You can also use webhooks in Rapyd to monitor subscription lifecycle events like subscription.created, payment.completed, or subscription.cancelled.

At this point, you’ve created an application that can manage royalties, payouts, and subscriptions with Rapyd. Congratulations! You can find the full code for this tutorial on GitHub.

Conclusion

The financial side of content creation can be hard to manage, but the right tools can make it easier. Rapyd helps simplify payment operations so creators can spend less time on logistics and more time on creating.

Rapyd is more than just a payment provider; it’s an all-in-one fintech infrastructure that helps you move money with ease. Whether you’re managing complex royalty splits, scaling affiliate payouts, or automating recurring subscriptions, Rapyd’s APIs will help you build powerful, secure, and flexible payment systems quickly.

Check out the Client Portal or play around with Rapyd’s Sandbox and you’ll quickly see how easy it is to streamline payments and simplify your workflow with Rapyd.