Payment systems on Stripe: subscriptions, passes, donations and platform payouts.
Trevor Stuckless builds payment flows on Stripe, from Dundas, Ontario, for his own products and for platforms whose users need to get paid. Coach Console lets each personal trainer collect from their own clients through Stripe Connect, straight to their own bank at a 0% platform fee. Sons of Scripture takes subscriptions and donations in Canadian dollars, and the Blue Crane products run monthly plans and one-time passes.
What is a platform payment, and when does a business need one?
It is the arrangement where a platform's customers pay the people on the platform rather than the platform itself: a gym's clients paying their own trainer, for example. Stripe's product for it is Connect, which handles onboarding, identity checks and payouts for every account connected to the platform.
In Coach Console a trainer publishes session packs and memberships on their own storefront page, clients buy them without the trainer lifting a finger, the money lands in the trainer's account, and the trainer's phone gets a notification with the client's name the moment a pack is paid.
How do you make sure a payment really happened?
Credit on Stripe's word, never the browser's. A session pack is added to a client's balance when Stripe's signed webhook reports the completed checkout, not when a thank-you page loads, so a closed tab or a faked page cannot create a paid session.
The same rule runs through Blue Crane's own sales tracking. The value of each sale is set on the server from the plan that was bought, so a forged request to the tracking endpoint cannot write a made-up amount into the books.
Which kinds of payment has he shipped?
| Payment type | Product | Terms | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly plans | Blue Crane app | Business $24.99, Workflow $49.99 CAD a month, 30-day demo | Pricing |
| Free period, no card | SIGNAL | First 90 days free, then $29.99 a month | SIGNAL |
| One-time passes | Contractor Form Maker | $9 for 30 days or $69 a year | Form Maker |
| Client-to-trainer payments | Coach Console | Session packs and memberships through Stripe Connect, 0% platform fee | coachconsole.app |
| Subscriptions and donations | Sons of Scripture | In Canadian dollars | sonscanada.com |
What does a payment system cost?
Payments are part of a build rather than a separate product. On a managed website, online payments for booking or a store are one of the $50 a month add-ons (published terms). Inside a custom application, payments and payouts are scoped with the rest of the work.
What else does Trevor build?
- Websites built to be foundMulti-page sites written from the owner's own facts, checked by a deploy gate on every release.
- AI and search visibilityProving, crawler by crawler, that Google, Bing, ChatGPT and the rest can read a site, then fixing what cannot.
- Business applicationsSoftware that runs the work itself: job-site records, parts and stock, paper archives.
- AI featuresAI that removes one specific chore: site walks to estimates, paper to documents, websites an assistant can use.
- Data pipelinesReading hundreds of public sources on a schedule and handing back one thing a person can act on.
- Scheduling and eventsCheck-ins, calendars, rosters and maps for gyms, a festival and a members community.
- Media and advertisingSix media titles and the ad server that sells and counts every placement directly.
Talk to Trevor about a payment system.
Describe what the business needs and what it is doing by hand today. You will get a straight answer on whether this is the right job for it, and what it would cost.