Connect Lemon Squeezy

Why Lemon Squeezy

A merchant of record at 5% + 50¢, so sales tax and VAT are handled for you. Popular for digital products, templates and small software.

The one quirk to know before you start

Lemon Squeezy's API cannot create products. That is their limitation, not kitty's.

So kitty needs one catch-all product to price against: you create a single product in Lemon Squeezy, at any price at all, and paste its variant id. kitty then overrides the price on every checkout it creates. You will never see that product's own price charged.

Name it something you will recognise later, like "kitty checkout".

Where to get the four values

Lemon Squeezy API key — app.lemonsqueezy.com/settings/api → create a key.

Store id — the numeric id in your store's dashboard URL. Open your store and read it out of the address bar.

Catch-all variant id — create the product described above, open it, and copy the variant id (not the product id). A product with a single variant still has a distinct variant id.

Webhook signing secret — app.lemonsqueezy.com/settings/webhooks → add a webhook pointing at the URL kitty gives you (see below). Lemon Squeezy lets you choose this secret rather than generating one, so pick something long and random and paste the same string into both places.

Connecting

Settings → Connections → Take payments → the Lemon Squeezy card → Connect → fill the four fields → Save and connect. Test connection comes back naming your Lemon Squeezy account.

The webhook, which is not optional

kitty needs Lemon Squeezy to tell it when someone pays. Without that, the checkout takes the money and no order, customer or revenue figure ever appears in kitty.

On the connected card, press Webhook URL, copy it, and paste it into app.lemonsqueezy.com/settings/webhooks as a new webhook.

Treat that URL like a password — anyone holding it can post events at this venture. It never expires; you rotate it by disconnecting and reconnecting. Deliveries are capped at 300 a minute per venture.

What it can and cannot do here

One-off sales only. Lemon Squeezy bills a subscription from the variant itself, which its API cannot create — so kitty cannot make a recurring offer on it, and says so rather than arming something that quietly charges once. For subscriptions, use Polar or Paddle.

Refunds are issued in Lemon Squeezy's dashboard; kitty records them when they are reported.

After it's connected

Test connection proves the key works right now, and names the account it reached — so a member with two logins can see they pasted the wrong one. Do that before you put anything on sale.

Then, in Where new checkouts go, pick this provider on its own or One page, every method, which offers every provider you've connected on a single page and quietly hides one that starts failing.

Anything already on sale keeps the provider it was armed on. A price, once created at a provider, cannot be moved — so to switch, open the venture's Revenue tab, Take off sale, then put it back on sale.

How the keys are stored

Encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, used server-side only, never returned to the browser, never written to a log, and never shown again after saving.

Payment keys are scoped to a venture or the whole workspace, never to you personally — two businesses in one workspace settle into two different bank accounts, so a personal key is refused for money on purpose.