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Send Automatic Recurring Payments on Venmo

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TLDR

I wrote a script to send automatic recurring payment requests on Venmo using Python, Telegram and GitHub Actions 🚀

🔗 Link to repo

Backstory

I’ve had this idea for a while. For the past 2-3 years, every month I send the same Venmo requests to the same 3 family members. I thought to myself, “Is there a way I can make these automatic?”

And, I didn’t have a good system. I would send the request if I remembered or if I happened to see the receipt in my email.

I remember looking for a solution back then, but didn’t find anything.

Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time writing scripts to automate things. I remembered my idea and thought, “Maybe today you can do it.”

Low and behold, you can!

@mohad3s wrote a wrapper for the Venmo API in Python which makes requesting money as easy as calling a function.

Since GitHub Actions gives you 2,000 minutes per month + they can run on a schedule (aka cron), meaning you can run this for free!

The icing on the cake was adding notifier by @liiight which lets you easily send notifications via various providers (in my case, Telegram).

This meant I could run the script and send notifications using a Telegram bot letting me know things succeeded.

How it Works

Demo

Here’s a ~2min video of me talking a bit about it and waking through some of the code.

It was a fun project to build! I open sourced it as well. You can check it out here 🌟