#Payments

The Payments plugin lets your site take real card payments. Checkout happens on Stripe's secure, familiar payment page, and the money goes straight to your own Stripe account — startupjs.ai is never in the middle of your revenue.

#What you can build with it

Completed payments appear as orders your site can show — each visitor sees only their own, you see all of them, and a guest's purchases follow them into their account if they sign up later.

#Your orders page

Turning this plugin on adds an Orders page to your admin panel: the newest orders with their items, buyer, total and status (pending or paid), and four tiles over that window — paid revenue in the last 7 days and 30 days, how many paid orders there are, and the average order value. It's the answer to "did that actually go through?" without opening Stripe.

The page is read-only, and that's the point: orders are created only by the plugin's own server code — a pending order when checkout starts, flipped to paid by Stripe's confirmation — so neither a visitor nor a mistake in a page can edit, fake or delete one.

#Connecting your Stripe account

This plugin has no shared built-in mode — payments always run on your Stripe account, so the money is yours from day one. Setup takes a few minutes and starts in test mode:

The steps below are the same ones shown on the plugin's configuration page in your dashboard — that page is where "the field here" lives.

1. Create a Stripe account at dashboard.stripe.com/register (business details can be finished later — test mode works right away).
2. In the Stripe dashboard open Developers → API keys.
3. Copy the Secret key. Start with the test key (sk_test_…) — you can place test orders with Stripe's test card 4242 4242 4242 4242, and the plugin shows a TEST MODE badge so you can't forget.
4. Paste it into the field here. Optionally set your currency (defaults to usd).
5. When you're ready to charge real cards: complete Stripe's business activation, then replace the key with the live one (sk_live_…).

The plugin registers its Stripe webhook automatically — you never need to touch the Webhooks page in the Stripe dashboard.

#Test mode first

With a test key (sk_test_…) everything works end to end, except the money is pretend: use Stripe's test card number 4242 4242 4242 4242 with any future date and any code. The plugin shows a clear TEST MODE badge the whole time, so there's no forgetting which key is in. When you're ready, swap in the live key — nothing else changes.

#Built-in protections

• Price integrity. The amount charged always comes from your site's own data at the moment of purchase — a tampered page can never charge a made-up amount.
• Orders are read-only. Neither visitors nor page bugs can edit or fake an order; orders are only ever created by verified, completed payments.
• Your key stays secret. Like all credentials, the Stripe key is write-only — never visible in the dashboard, to the AI, or in chat.

Not available yet: recurring subscriptions and marketplace-style payouts to third parties. One-time payments — products, bookings, donations, tickets — are what this plugin does today.