How payments work.
Who takes the money, what each of them can and cannot do, and what happens to your card afterwards. There is a working till at the bottom of this page that charges nothing, so none of this has to be taken on trust.
Two processors, one at a time
PayPal and Stripe. Which one is in use is a single site-wide setting rather than a different answer on every page, so the invoice, the deposit, the booking and the care plan all go the same way. A processor with no keys configured is never offered whatever that setting says — the setting describes what is wanted, not what is possible.
Neither of them is a middleman I have added. They are the merchant of record for your card details: the fields you type into belong to them and are served from their domain, inside your browser. A card number has never reached this site and there is no code here that could receive one.
What you can pay with
A one-off payment — a deposit, an invoice, a booking, a hosting pass — and a recurring care plan are not the same thing to a payment network, and several methods work for one and not the other. The honest version:
| Method | One-off | Care plan | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Card | Yes | Yes | Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover and the rest. |
| Apple Pay | Yes | Yes | A card underneath, so it goes where cards go. |
| Google Pay | Yes | Yes | Same. Currently switched off on the Stripe account, so it will not appear until that changes. |
| Link | Yes | Yes | Stripe’s own saved-details network. If you already use it anywhere else, it recognises you here. |
| Cash App Pay | Yes | Yes | Confirmed in the Cash App on your phone. |
| Amazon Pay | Yes | Yes | Uses whatever is already on your Amazon account. |
| Klarna | Yes | No | Pay in instalments. Stripe does not offer either one in a subscription checkout, so they are there for a build or a deposit and not for a care plan. You are paying a lender, not me — I am paid in full on the day, and the arrangement after that is between you and them. |
| Affirm | Yes | No | |
| PayPal | Yes | Yes | Its own checkout, with its own balance, bank or card behind it. |
Which of these you actually see is decided at the till, not here. Stripe offers a method only where it is available in your country and currency and valid for the amount — the instalment options in particular have a floor and a ceiling, so they appear on a build and not on a $15 renewal.
What happens to your card
Nothing is kept unless you ask for it. Where a card can be saved you are shown a tick box, never pre-ticked, and leaving it alone means the card is used once and forgotten.
If you do tick it, the card is held by Stripe rather than here, and what this site stores is a reference to it. It is offered back to you the next time you buy something, so you confirm instead of typing. You can remove it from your own Billing page at any time. The full terms are in payments, subscriptions & billing.
A card paying for an active care plan cannot be removed until the plan is cancelled or another card takes over, because the next renewal would otherwise fail.
Refunds, disputes and receipts
Every payment gets a receipt by email from the processor that took it, whichever that was. Refunds go back to the method that paid, which is not a policy choice — it is the only route the networks allow. What is and is not refundable is set out under refunds & cancellations, and the short version is that a deposit buys the first phase of work and that phase starts when it clears.
Do you want to take payments yourself?
If you are having a site built and it needs to charge people, this is the part clients most often expect to be hard. It is not, and it does not involve me holding your money: you open your own Stripe account, it pays out to your own bank, and I build the checkout against it. Opening the account takes about twenty minutes and needs your business details and a bank account.
Everything on this page — the methods, the wallets, the instalment options, the saved cards, the tax handling — is the same integration I would build for you. Ask me about it, or book a call.
Try it. Nothing is charged.
Below is a real Stripe payment form, in test mode, showing the methods this account has switched on. It is drawn by Stripe, not by me, so it cannot show you something that is not really there. The Pay button is deliberately inert, and the keys behind it are test keys, so there is nothing here that could take money even if it were pressed.
See also payments & billing, refunds & cancellations and what things cost.