GroundCut + Stripe

Two costs total: your $99/mo GroundCut subscription, and Stripe’s standard processing fees (2.9% + $0.30 per online transaction in the US at the time of writing) on each customer charge. That’s the entire bill — GroundCut takes a 0% platform fee today, so a $100 booking costs the customer $100, you receive ~$96.80, and only Stripe’s processing fee comes out of the difference. No per-user fee, no per-customer fee, no SMS overage. The Connect plumbing is in place to enable a platform fee in the future, but no GroundCut fee is being retained on customer charges right now. You can also pass card fees to the customer with the pass_card_fee_to_customer setting if your market tolerates it.

Yes. In /admin/settings → Payments, set payment_collection to "external" and add your payment instructions ("cash or check on completion"). Booking still works — the customer doesn’t enter card details, the job is created with an unpaid invoice, and the crew mobile app prompts you to mark the invoice paid when the customer pays in person. You lose the paid-at-booking lock-in and the recurring auto-charge benefit, but it’s a real option.

Card data never touches GroundCut servers. The Stripe Payment Element is an iframe rendered inside the booking page — the customer types their card directly into Stripe’s domain. GroundCut only ever sees the resulting payment_intent_id. This keeps the platform out of PCI scope at the SAQ-A level and means your customers’ data is held to Stripe’s standards, not ours.

Stripe Smart Retries kicks in automatically — typically four retries over two weeks. During retries the local recurring_schedule stays active. If all retries fail, Stripe ends the subscription and sends customer.subscription.deleted with cancellation_details.reason="payment_failed". GroundCut deactivates the schedule with deactivated_reason="unpaid", deletes future scheduled jobs, and creates a lost_recurring follow-up on your dashboard so you can call the customer.

Yes. From /admin/invoices, the Refund action calls Stripe’s refund API. Partial refunds are supported. The refund flows through the connected account so the money returns from your balance, not from the platform. The webhook for charge.refunded flips the invoice to void if fully refunded and inserts a negative payments row for accounting accuracy.