Where Your Money Actually Sits
GoCushy settles into your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account. We are never the merchant of record, and we never hold your funds. That means the customer relationship, the payment data and the payout timing stay with you. It also means tax registration, chargebacks and refunds stay with you. Lifetime access is $295 one-time with 0% GoCushy platform fees. Your processor still charges its own standard rate.
The question most people ask too late
People choose a checkout by comparing features. Order bumps, upsells, subscriptions, affiliates. Reasonable enough. But there is a plainer question underneath all of it, and most sellers only ask it after something has gone sideways.
When a buyer pays you, whose account does that money land in first?
The answer determines more than you would expect. It decides who the buyer's bank sees. It decides who gets the email when a card is disputed. It decides who is legally selling the thing. And it decides what happens to your recurring revenue on the day you decide to use different software.
How GoCushy is wired
You connect your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account. All three rails are live. When a buyer checks out, the charge is created against your account, and the money lands in your balance on your processor's normal schedule.
GoCushy is not a stop along the way. We are not holding the funds for a day, or a week, or until a payout run. There is no GoCushy balance page with your money in it, because there is no GoCushy balance. We are software that talks to your processor on your behalf and then gets out of the way.
That is the whole mechanism. It is not clever. It is just a decision about where the money sits, made once, at the architectural level.
The other model, described fairly
The alternative is a merchant-of-record platform. In that model the platform becomes the legal seller of the product. The buyer is transacting with them, not with you. The money goes into their account first, and then they pay you out on their schedule, minus their cut.
That is a real product with real reasons to exist. Some sellers actively want someone else standing in the legal position of seller. I am not going to pretend it is a trick. It is a trade, and it is a defensible one.
But it is a trade, and the terms of it are often discovered rather than chosen. So it is worth being specific about what the other side of that trade looks like.
What follows from settling in your own account
- You own the customer relationship. The buyer's payment record lives in your processor account, under your business, with your name on the statement.
- You own the payment data. It is not a report handed to you by a middle layer. It is your account's own history.
- Payouts run on your processor's schedule, not on a platform's. There is no second queue between you and your bank.
- You are not exposed to a platform's account freeze or payout hold. If our software has a bad day, that is our problem to fix, not a gate between you and money you have already earned.
- If you stop using GoCushy, your processor relationship continues, and so do the subscriptions running on it. The recurring revenue is attached to your account, not to your account with us.
That last one is the point I would most want a seller to understand before signing up for anything, ours included. Software should be easy to leave. If leaving costs you your recurring revenue, you were not really a customer.
What stays on your desk
Now the honest half. Because you are the seller of record, the obligations of being the seller are yours.
Tax registration is yours. Where you need to be registered, and what you need to collect, is a question for you and your accountant, in your jurisdictions. We are not carrying that for you.
Chargebacks are yours. When a buyer disputes a charge, the dispute is against your processor account, and you are the one who responds to it with evidence.
Refunds are yours. The money went into your account, so it comes back out of your account.
GoCushy provides the machinery. It does not absorb the liability. If what you want is for somebody else to be legally responsible for your sales, then a merchant-of-record platform is the correct choice for you, and you should take it. I would rather say that plainly than sell you something that does not fit. There is a longer comparison at GoCushy vs ThriveCart if you want to see the models set side by side.
What we charge, and what we do not
Lifetime access is $295, paid once, with 0% GoCushy platform fees on that plan. Your payment processor still charges its own standard rate, and it charges it directly, because it is your account.
We have no percentage of your sales to take, because your sales never touch us. That is not generosity. It is the same architectural decision, showing up on the invoice.
A smaller mechanism that belongs to the same idea
Prices are computed on the server. The browser is shown a number, but it never decides one. If a page is modified in a buyer's own browser, the amount charged does not change, because the amount was never the page's to determine.
It is a small thing next to settlement, but it comes from the same instinct. Decide, at the level of the plumbing, who is allowed to be in charge of the money. Then build so the answer cannot quietly drift.
If you want the technical detail, it is in the documentation. If you want to know who is behind this and why it is built this way, that is on the founder page.