For merchants
What Payflow gives you
The ability to bill a Stellar customer repeatedly without them signing each time, and without you holding their keys or their money.
What it does not give you
A guarantee of payment. A mandate means you may collect what was agreed — not that the funds will be there. If a subscriber’s vault is empty, the charge fails. Treat it like a declined card: retry, notify, and dun.
1. Publish a plan
Go to Merchant, set a price and a billing period, and publish.
Choose carefully. Price and period are frozen into every mandate opened against that plan. You cannot edit them afterwards — by design, so subscribers know what they agreed to.
To change pricing, publish a new plan and deactivate the old one. Existing subscribers stay on their original terms until they move.
2. Share it
Subscribers open a mandate from the Subscribe page. Each mandate is independent: cancelling one does not affect the others.
3. Get paid
A charge settles when someone calls charge on a due mandate. That can be:
- The Payflow keeper, automatically. The default.
- You, from the merchant dashboard. Any mandate showing as due has a Charge now button.
- Anyone else. Charging is permissionless.
You are never dependent on us being online to collect.
4. Track revenue
The merchant dashboard shows:
- Collected — total received, net of the protocol fee.
- Active mandates — how many subscribers are currently billable.
- Charges settled — lifetime successful charges.
Fees
The protocol takes 1% on the current testnet deployment, capped in the contract at 10%. On a 10 XLM charge you receive 9.9 XLM.
Deactivating a plan
Deactivating stops new subscriptions. It does not end existing mandates — those keep billing normally.
Ending a subscriber’s mandate
In Subscribers, choose End next to an active or paused mandate, then confirm. This calls end_mandate: the mandate is cancelled for good and is never charged again. Ending cannot take money from the subscriber or refund it; it only stops future charges. The subscriber’s account page shows that you ended it.
If you are shutting a product down, deactivate the plan so nobody new can subscribe, then end the open mandates.
More on the recurring questions above: FAQ.