About GlassRelay
GlassRelay is made by Vertyco LLC, the company behind the Vertyco ARK game community. We built it for our own Discord first, after years of checking supporter payments against PayPal by hand.
Where we come from
Vertyco started in August 2019 as a single ARK: Survival Evolved server (ARK is a survival game with dinosaurs), set up because a family member asked for one. It filled up, so we opened a Discord for it that September. Seven years later the community runs 28 game servers, and its Discord has more than 9,500 members.
That many servers takes a lot of homemade tooling. The biggest piece is Arkon, a Discord bot that lets anyone hosting their own ARK servers run them from Discord. Vert started it in 2021, and about 1,100 Discord servers use it today.
Who writes the code
Vert has been coding since 2021 and has done it for a living since 2022. He started with add-ons (Red calls them cogs) for Red-DiscordBot, a free, open-source Discord bot that anyone can extend. The first was a small cog called Inspire, written to learn how Red worked. He still works on open source projects on the side, including the 43 cogs that grew out of that first one.
Why we built it
We've sold supporter roles through Upgrade.Chat since September 2021, and the money has always reached our own PayPal and Stripe accounts. Checking it was the problem.
Around mid-2024, PayPal subscriptions sold through Upgrade.Chat stopped carrying the ID PayPal gave them. By 2025, more than nine in ten of ours had an ID that PayPal couldn't find. So to confirm a payment, Vert scrolled the PayPal feed and paired entries up by price and time.
Chargebacks (when a buyer asks PayPal to reverse a payment) were harder still, because the dispute didn't say which member it was. Once we matched one by price and time, picked the wrong person, and had to undo it.
Support was slow on top of that. One bug we reported, where a customer's page showed every payment as $0, took 13 months to fix. In July 2026 Vert started writing GlassRelay. Early on, the research turned up 11 members whose last recorded payment on Upgrade.Chat was months old, while PayPal was still charging all 11 of them every month.
What that changed
Every payment on GlassRelay keeps the ID your payment provider gave it, so you can look it up in PayPal or Stripe yourself. A disputed payment links straight to the member who made it. Where your money goes covers how the money moves.
How we run
Vertyco LLC has no investors. The ARK community's supporters pay the bills, and GlassRelay charges a flat price for the software while taking nothing from your sales. Our own supporter roles are moving onto it from Upgrade.Chat, so we'll be the first to hit anything that breaks.
Questions, or a number that doesn't match your PayPal or Stripe account? Ask us in the support Discord.