Take payments from your customers

The one thing to understand first

The money is never ours. Every provider is connected with your own account credentials, and funds settle to you. kitty creates the checkout, verifies the provider's webhook and records the order. It is never in the flow of funds, and it takes no cut of what you sell.

That also means kitty never sees a card number. Every provider either hosts its own payment page or renders its form in its own iframes, so card details go from your customer straight to the processor.

Connecting one

Settings → Connections → the Take payments card → pick the venture, if you have more than one → find the provider → Connect.

Each provider asks for the handful of values it actually needs, one field at a time, with a note under each saying exactly where in that provider's dashboard to find it. Then Save and connect.

Which one should you pick?

There is no single right answer, but there is a shape to it.

If you want	Pick
The shortest possible setup, no API keys to find	Stripe Connect
Full control, and you already know Stripe	Stripe
Someone else to handle global sales tax and VAT	Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy
PayPal and Venmo next to cards	Braintree
Crypto, settled to your own wallet	NowPayments, Coinbase Commerce, CoinPayments, BitPay or Crypto.com Pay
The cheapest card rate in the UK and Europe	Revolut Business
Multi-currency receiving alongside acceptance	Airwallex

The merchant-of-record option is worth a paragraph of its own, because it is the one most people get wrong. With Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy, the provider is the legal seller. They collect and remit sales tax and VAT wherever your customer happens to be. Sell a template to someone in Germany on your own Stripe and the VAT obligation is yours to discover; with a merchant of record you simply never have one. It costs roughly 5% instead of 2.9%, and for most people starting out that is a bargain.

One page, every method

You can connect more than one. Choose One page, every method and every buy button points at a single page offering card, PayPal and crypto side by side, with a "don't have crypto?" step for customers who want to pay in it but hold none.

That page also watches each provider's health. One that has failed repeatedly and succeeded not at all in the last ten minutes is hidden from customers automatically, so a processor having a bad afternoon costs you nothing if you have a second one connected. You get told about it separately.

What each provider needs from you

Only Stripe and Stripe Connect register their webhook automatically. Every other provider has no API for it, so you copy a webhook URL from the card and paste it into their dashboard — the article for each one says exactly where. Skip that step and the checkout will take money that never shows up in kitty.