The problem
Running a subscription tipping product day to day means publishing each day's selections reliably, marking every one of them win, place or loss once results are known, and gating access by paid tier — without a person doing any of that by hand, every single day, forever.
What was built
FingertipForm runs an ingestion pipeline that publishes each day's tips insert-only: re-running the same day's import, or importing a corrected re-export of it, can never silently rewrite a selection, price or comment that's already been published. A separate settlement process is the only thing allowed to touch a published tip afterward — and only its result and profit fields, nothing else. On top of that, a billing layer integrating both Stripe and PayPal automatically gates content by subscription tier.
Why this is the hard part
The genuinely hard requirement here isn't the plumbing — it's the guarantee. Once a tip is published, it has to stay exactly as published, forever, no matter how many times the source feed gets re-ingested. Settlement is deliberately the only path onto an already-published record, and it can only change two fields. That kind of correctness has to be designed into a pipeline from day one; it's not something you can safely bolt on after the fact once real subscribers are trusting what they see.