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 🚀
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
- Python script sends Venmo request to 3 people
- Telegram bot sends me a message after each request is sent
- Uses GitHub Actions + scheduled workflows to run automatically
- Other script runs once a week to make sure everything is working
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 🌟