How money actually moves through the product: checkout, authentication, capture, refunds, payouts, retries.
The Payments Teardown
A consistent four-part review of how money moves, how it is configured, how it is run, and what it costs. Useful work starts with seeing the system clearly.
System view
One operating map, four diagnostic passes.
The work is deliberately narrow: identify the payment path, find the broken assumptions, then leave the team with decisions they can actually use.
The settings underneath: Stripe or PSP setup, tax, SCA, webhooks, currencies, plans, prices, and idempotency.
How payments are run day to day: reconciliation, failed payments, disputes, refunds, dunning, and reporting.
What it costs and earns: processing fees, FX, decline rates, involuntary churn, and the levers that matter.
Flow
How money actually moves through the product: checkout, authentication, capture, refunds, payouts, retries.
We trace the payment path from the customer action to the money arriving where it should. The aim is to find breaks, double-handling, wrong assumptions, and steps that add friction without reducing risk.
Configuration
The settings underneath: Stripe or PSP setup, tax, SCA, webhooks, currencies, plans, prices, and idempotency.
Most payment problems are not dramatic product failures. They are settings no one has checked since launch. We look at the parts that quietly decide whether billing behaves properly.
Operations
How payments are run day to day: reconciliation, failed payments, disputes, refunds, dunning, and reporting.
A working setup still needs operating habits. We look at who sees what, what happens when a payment fails, how disputes are handled, and whether the team can explain the numbers.
Economics
What it costs and earns: processing fees, FX, decline rates, involuntary churn, and the levers that matter.
Payment economics are not just fees. We separate the cost of processing from the cost of failed payments, poor retries, tax mistakes, support load, and decisions that make revenue harder to collect.
Inputs and outputs
What we need to see, and what your team gets back.
The point is not to collect everything. It is to get enough signal to make payment decisions less vague.
The payment path
- Checkout or billing flow
- Provider and platform setup
- Screenshots, events, invoices, dashboards, or support examples
The decision pressure
- What needs to change
- Who owns the decision
- What cannot break during the fix
The useful handoff
- Prioritized recommendations
- Risks and tradeoffs
- Next owner, next question, or next build item
What it feels like
Focused, specific, and close to the actual system.
We ask for the few things that matter, look at the flow in front of us, and separate real payment issues from guesses. The output is plain language your team can use.
No inflated discovery phase. No generic dashboards. No advice that depends on invented assumptions.
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Ready when there is something real to fix
Book a teardown call
No decks. No dashboards. A payment system that works.
Start with the service that matches the decision. Each request opens a structured email so the first call has the right context attached.