The fine print — money, plainly

Who actually processes your payment, who holds your card, where the money goes, and what the platform's cut is. No mystery meat.

Who touches your card

Payments are processed by Stripe, one of the largest payment processors in the world. Card entry happens in Stripe's own secure fields — your card number and security code never pass through or get stored on this platform. What the platform keeps is the display stub (brand, last four, expiry) and a reference token only Stripe can use.
This is a deliberate architecture with a name (PCI SAQ-A, for the professionals): the platform cannot leak what it never possesses.

Where your money goes

When you buy from an organization, the money routes to that organization's own merchant account (Stripe Connect). The platform is the venue, not the till — each org receives its own funds, handles its own payouts.
The platform never takes a cut of the organization's revenue. The seller keeps the full listed price. What keeps the lights on is a small service fee on the buyer's side — and you see it, plainly, which is the next section.

The service fee — itemized, never hidden

At checkout, the service fee appears as its own line: a percentage of the price plus a few cents fixed. It's never folded into the listed price, so what the organization charges and what the platform charges are always two visible, separate things. It's the same fee whichever way you pay — it covers running the platform and the cost of taking the payment.
Small tickets get a break automatically: on inexpensive items, the fixed part waives itself, so a cheap drop-in never wears a fee that looks like a concert surcharge.
Some organizations choose to absorb the service fee for their buyers — then you simply see the clean price, no fee line at all, and the organization pays the fee out of its price.
Memberships work the same way. A membership whose fee is passed on bills one amount that names its parts — "$150.00 + $10.75 service fee" — and the organization receives its full $150.00. If the organization covers the fee, you pay the plan price and the fee comes out of what it receives. Either way the fee is never hidden inside the plan price.
The numbers behind the fee print on your receipt. The math is checkable, on purpose.

Refunds, credits & what comes back

A refund returns your money to your card, and the service fee comes back with it, in full proportion — half the money back, half the fee back; all of it, all of it. You're always made whole for the part refunded; the cost of the refunded payment is the organization's, never yours.
An organization may offer you a credit (say, a class credit) instead of a refund. A credit keeps your money where it was and gives you something to spend it on — nothing moves back, and nothing about the original purchase changes. Whether that trade suits you is always your conversation with the organization.

Disputes & chargebacks

If you dispute a charge with your bank, that process runs through Stripe to the selling organization. Order history reflects the dispute state. Honest advice: message the organization first — refunds are faster than disputes for everyone.

While your bank is deciding, the organization can't also refund that charge — the bank already holds the decision about where the money goes. If the bank decides for you, the charge is reversed in full; if the charge was for a subscription, that subscription ends at the same time.

For organizations: when a member disputes a charge, the disputed amount is held from your payouts until the bank decides. Win, and it comes back. Lose, and the cardholder's bank keeps it, the service fee is not returned (unlike a refund you issue), and a flat returned item fee applies to cover the card network's dispute cost. The fee is set by the platform operator (configuration key DISPUTE_RETURNED_ITEM_FEE_CENTS; US$25 by default), and your organization's payment settings show the current amount.

The paperwork

Receipts are per-purchase, in your order history.
The legal terms (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy) are Sessionata (dev)'s own documents: https://book.authport.sc.internal.loomboom.io/legal/terms · https://book.authport.sc.internal.loomboom.io/legal/privacy.
Professional/security evaluators: the technical security & data-handling overview is written for you.

Did you know? The service fee's fixed part waives itself on small tickets — below a set share of the price it simply disappears, so a five-dollar drop-in pays a few cents in fees, not a flat toll. Nobody has to remember to apply this; the math does it.