Getting Paid: Your Stripe, Your PayPal or a Payment Link

The platform takes 0% of your client revenue for a simple reason: it is never in the money path at all. Your clients pay you, through payment accounts that belong to you. Your job in this lesson is to connect at least one of the three supported methods — and to understand what each automates, because they differ exactly there.

The model in one paragraph

Open Settings → Payments in the partner dashboard. You can connect three kinds of method, in any combination: your own Stripe account, your own PayPal Business account, and up to five payment links — any other way you accept money, described as a name, an instruction and a URL. When a client opens the plan catalog in their dashboard, they see your plans and whichever methods you connected. Money then flows client → your account → your bank, on your provider's normal schedule. Refunds, disputes and taxes live in your accounts under their standard rules; you are the merchant of record. The billing documentation is the reference version of everything in this lesson.

Your own Stripe: the full-automation option

If you can get a Stripe account in your country, this is the method to set up first, because it automates the entire subscription lifecycle:

• Connecting means pasting one restricted API key from your Stripe dashboard — the form links to instructions; the key needs Checkout, Subscriptions and Webhooks permissions, nothing more. The platform validates it with a live call.
• From then on, everything is automatic. The platform builds a price catalog from your plans inside your Stripe account, opens card checkout there when a client subscribes, and registers a webhook so payments drive client statuses without you: successful payment → active; failed renewal → past-due with dunning emails from your brand; cancellation → access until the paid period ends.
• Dunning has teeth, on your behalf. A workspace that stays unpaid is suspended after seven days — existing links keep redirecting, but analytics and new links stop; after thirty days redirects stop too. You configured none of this; it simply protects your revenue.

Security worth knowing (clients ask): credentials are stored encrypted and used only at the moment of an API call; the dashboard shows no more than the last four characters of any key. Disconnecting a method stops new checkouts immediately.

Your own PayPal: the familiarity option

The second automated method. Paste the Client ID and Secret of your PayPal Business app; the platform creates products and plans in your PayPal, sends subscribing clients to PayPal's approval page, and registers a webhook so renewals and cancellations drive statuses — the same lifecycle automation as Stripe, running in your PayPal instead.

When it earns its place: audiences that trust the PayPal button more than a card form (common in several European markets), clients who want subscriptions consolidated in their PayPal, and regions where PayPal access is easier for you than Stripe. Many partners connect both and let the client pick — the checkout simply shows every method you connected.

Payment links: the everything-else option

The third method is deliberately manual, and it is the reason no partner is locked out of this business by geography or banking. A payment link is any way you accept money, packaged for the checkout: a crypto processor page, a Wise or bank-transfer instruction, an invoicing service — anything with a URL and a "how to pay" text. You can add up to five.

The flow is honest about its manual nature. The client sees your instruction and pays outside the platform, then presses "I paid". You get a notification; you verify the money actually arrived in your account; you confirm — and only then does the client's plan activate. No status ever changes on the client's word alone. There is no automatic dunning here either: renewals are relationships, not webhooks — track them with a calendar reminder, invoice a few days early, and push yearly billing hard for these clients, because one manual cycle a year is twelve times less admin than monthly.

A useful degenerate case: connect no methods at all, and the client checkout simply closes — clients see that their plan is assigned by their manager. You quote by email, take bank transfers, and activate plans by hand. Entirely workable for a service run like an agency retainer; connect a method whenever you outgrow it.

Choosing, in practice

• Stripe available to you? Connect it first. Card checkout with automated lifecycle converts strangers best — someone from your marketing efforts can go from pricing page to active client with zero contact.
• Audience with PayPal habits? Add PayPal alongside; it is the same automation and purely additive.
• No Stripe or PayPal in your situation — or clients who insist on invoices or crypto? Payment links carry the business fine; the cost is your own diligence on renewals.
• All of the above? Connect all of it. Methods are not exclusive, and each one removes a reason to not pay you.

Whatever you connect, payments made through Stripe and PayPal are mirrored into your panel — the Billing section shows each payment against its client, feeding your revenue view and, later, your affiliate program's commission math.

Checklist

• [ ] Connect your primary method in Settings → Payments — Stripe restricted key or PayPal credentials — and confirm the status shows connected.
• [ ] Run one end-to-end test: subscribe to your own cheapest plan as a client, watch the money arrive in your account, then refund it in your provider's dashboard and watch the status follow.
• [ ] If you added a payment link: write the client-facing instruction, pay yourself once through it, and press "I paid" to see the confirmation flow from both sides.
• [ ] Write down your renewal ritual for manual clients (invoice N days early, check account, confirm) — one sentence is enough, but write it down.
• [ ] Preview the client checkout with your plans and methods visible. That screen is your shop window; the next lesson — your first client in a week — is about walking someone up to it.