Bring your own Stripe: what you gain, and what you take on

Bringing your own gateway means the Stripe or Razorpay account is yours, not ours. Money settles straight to your bank, you keep whatever rate you negotiate, and you can leave without moving your payment relationship. It also means the chargebacks, the compliance and the account standing are yours. Here are both halves.

What does "bring your own gateway" actually mean?

You open an account with a payment provider in your own business's name. You paste that account's API keys into your store's settings. From then on, when a customer pays, the money goes from them to your account — it never passes through us.

The alternative model, which most hosted platforms use to some degree, is that the platform is the merchant of record. Payments are taken in the platform's name, the platform deducts its fees, and you get what's left on the platform's schedule. That model has real advantages, and we'll come to them.

The distinction sounds legal and abstract until something goes wrong, at which point it's the only thing that matters.

What do you gain?

Money that's already yours. Settlement is between your gateway and your bank, on their schedule. Nobody is holding your revenue in an account you can't see, and there's no platform balance to withdraw from.

Your own rate, including every improvement you earn. Processing rates are negotiable once you have volume. When you negotiate a better one, you keep all of it — there's no intermediary re-marking it up. On a platform that resells payments, the rate you get is the rate they decide to pass on.

The customer relationship. Your business name is on the statement. Disputes come to you, refunds go out from your account, and your payment history builds under your own merchant ID rather than inside someone else's aggregate.

The ability to leave. This is the one people underrate. If your gateway is yours, changing storefront platforms doesn't mean re-onboarding with a payment provider, re-verifying your business, or losing your processing history. The gateway stays put and the storefront moves. That's true of leaving us, too — which is rather the point.

No platform cut. We charge a flat subscription and take 0% of your sales. You still pay your processor their rate, exactly as you would anywhere else — nobody removes that, and any comparison implying otherwise is selling you something. What you avoid is a second fee layered on top. If you want that argument with numbers, it's in our piece on Shopify's transaction fees.

What do you take on?

This is the half that gets left out of posts like this, so here it is plainly.

Chargebacks and disputes are yours. When a customer disputes a charge, your gateway debits your account and you respond with evidence. Nobody absorbs that for you, and there's no platform support queue to escalate into.

Underwriting and account standing are yours. You apply, you get verified, and if the provider decides your business is high-risk or freezes the account, that's between you and them. A platform acting as merchant of record shields you from some of this by absorbing you into their own risk profile.

Tax registration and filing are yours. We calculate tax and put it on a proper invoice — that's documented here — but we never remit or file anything. Whether you need to register, and where, is your call and your accountant's. A merchant-of-record platform genuinely does take that burden on, and for some businesses that alone justifies the model.

Some setup. You'll create an account, verify your business, and paste two keys. It's an afternoon, not a project — but it's not zero, and it's a step you don't have on platforms that hand you payments switched on.

None of that is a reason to avoid BYO. It's a reason to know which model you're choosing.

Which gateways can I connect today?

Seven rails ship in the box, and we'd rather be precise than impressive about their status:

Proven in production — merchants are transacting on these today:

• Stripe
• Razorpay
• Offline (cash on delivery, bank transfer)

Built and selectable, but no money has moved through them yet — the adapters are implemented, unit-tested, and available in your settings, but we haven't yet run a real transaction through the provider's live API:

• Mollie
• Paystack
• Flutterwave
• Xendit

We keep that distinction in the code rather than in a marketing sentence, because "the tests pass" and "money moved" are different claims. A previous version of our own site called four of those "coming soon" when they were fully implemented and selectable; the list above is now derived from the provider registry so it can't drift again.

Refunds issued from inside Niblr currently work on Stripe and Razorpay. On the others you'd refund from the gateway's own dashboard and mark the order refunded here. That's documented too.

Where does Niblr sit in all this?

Nowhere, structurally — and that's deliberate rather than modest.

We never touch the money. Your keys are encrypted at rest and used server-side to talk to your gateway; the checkout hands your provider an amount and your provider captures it. We don't hold a balance, we can't pay you out, and we couldn't take a percentage of a sale without rebuilding the architecture to put ourselves in the flow.

What we do own is the arithmetic. The cart computes the total, the tax and the invoice — gateways capture the number handed to them and calculate nothing. So a wrong total is our bug even though it's your money, which is why that code has no floating-point maths in it.

There's a business consequence we'll state out loud: because we earn nothing on payments, the subscription carries the whole company. We only make money if the software is worth paying for every month. That's a harder game than taking a slice of every order, and it's the one we'd rather play.

What if I'd rather someone else handled all this?

Then be honest with yourself that a merchant-of-record platform may suit you better, and pick one.

If you're a solo founder selling digital goods into thirty tax jurisdictions, the compliance burden BYO puts on you is real and a MoR absorbing it is worth paying for. If your worry is a frozen payment account and you'd rather that be someone else's problem, an aggregator genuinely does spread that risk.

Where BYO wins clearly: you're an established business with your own entity and bank account, you sell mostly in your own market, you have or expect enough volume to negotiate on rate, and platform risk — the surprise fee change, the account decision you can't appeal — is the thing that keeps you up. That's most of the merchants we build for.

Ready to set it up? Connecting Stripe or Razorpay takes about ten minutes, and the keys never leave the server.