App Payments Terms
These terms govern App Payments — the facility that lets an application you built on UpliftOS charge its own end users. They apply to you as the organization that owns the application, and they sit alongside our Terms of Service, App Ownership & License, and Billing & Credits.
App Payments is not the Marketplace. If you are selling a listing on the UpliftOS Marketplace, read the Marketplace Seller Agreement instead — the seller-of-record position is different, and Section 2 explains why.
1. How the Money Moves
App Payments runs on Stripe Connect. You connect a Stripe account; your application's charges are created on your account, and the money lands there. UpliftOS does not receive your revenue and does not hold it on your behalf.
Two things follow from that, and both are deliberate:
- Your application holds no payment credential. It cannot create a charge by itself. When an end user checks out, your application asks UpliftOS for a checkout session, and UpliftOS creates that session against your connected account with our platform fee attached. This is what makes the fee in Section 3 enforceable rather than optional.
- You must connect an account that can actually take money before your application can charge anyone. Until a payout-capable account is connected, checkout is refused rather than queued.
2. You Are the Merchant of Record
For every charge your application makes to its own end users, you are the merchant of record. The charge is on your Stripe account, in your name, to your customer. That means:
- The sales-tax, VAT, and GST obligations on that sale are yours, in every jurisdiction where you have them
- You set the price, the currency, the tiers, and the terms of sale
- The commercial relationship, including the receipt, the invoice, and the dispute, is between you and your end user
- UpliftOS is the payment facilitator and the technology provider, and is not a party to that sale
This is a structural position, not a drafting preference: charges are created directly on your account, which is the arrangement in which you are the seller. The Marketplace works the other way — a Marketplace purchase settles to UpliftOS first and UpliftOS is the merchant of record there — which is why the two are governed by separate documents and must not be read across.
You are responsible for your application's own terms of sale, refund policy, and consumer-law compliance, including subscription cancellation and renewal-notice requirements where they apply to you.
3. The Platform Fee — What It Is, and What Sets It
UpliftOS takes a percentage of each payment your application collects. The rate is set by what the payment does, not by who is paying and not by what the tier is called. There are three rates, and they are applied per payment, per tier:
- 0% — a verified nonprofit organization receiving money that unlocks nothing. A gift. UpliftOS takes nothing.
- 2% — money that unlocks nothing, received by anyone else. Not a sale; the rate covers the cost of carrying the payment.
- 20% — a sale: paying changes what the payer can do.
"Unlocks something" is observed from the tier, not declared by you. The question is whether paying writes an entitlement, flips a flag, or gates a record — whether the payer can do something afterwards that they could not do before. A tier that unlocks nothing is not a sale however it is labeled, and a tier that unlocks a feature is a sale however it is labeled. In practice, a recurring tier is treated as unlocking something, because stopping payment stops the thing.
The 0% rate requires verified nonprofit status, not a self-declaration. It is the rate worth misstating, so it is the one we check.
One application can legitimately sit at more than one rate: a hospital foundation taking gifts at 0% and selling a staff training module at 20% is two tiers, assessed separately. The unit is the tier being bought, never the application and never the campaign.
Stripe's own processing fees are separate from ours, are charged by Stripe against your account, and are not part of the percentages above.
4. Refunds
You issue refunds. Only an authenticated owner or administrator of the organization that owns the application can refund a charge — your application itself cannot, and neither can your end user through us. Refunds may be full or partial, up to the amount not already refunded.
When you refund, our platform fee comes back with it, in proportion to the amount refunded. This is unconditional: it is not a setting, not a negotiation, and not something you have to ask for. If you return all of a payment, you keep none of it and neither do we.
Chargebacks, disputes, and their fees fall on your Stripe account, because the charge was yours. You are responsible for responding to them.
5. What Your Application May and May Not Do
Through its scoped platform credential, your application may do exactly two things with payments: start a checkout session, and ask whether a given user is entitled. It cannot read another application, cannot issue a refund, and holds no Stripe credential of any kind.
You may not attempt to route your application's end-user payments around App Payments in order to avoid the platform fee — for example by embedding your own payment credential in an application UpliftOS hosts and builds, or by moving a gated sale off-platform while continuing to gate it on-platform. Taking payment outside the platform for access the platform grants is a breach of these terms, and we may suspend App Payments for the application.
Nothing here prevents you from selling elsewhere, on your own infrastructure, outside UpliftOS. The fee attaches to payments that flow through the platform's checkout, not to your business.
6. Your End Users, and Their Data
Your end users are your customers. Your application's terms and privacy notice govern them; the platform-level baseline is at Terms for Applications Built on UpliftOS. Personal data your application collects at checkout is controlled by you, and processed by UpliftOS on your behalf under the Data Processing Addendum.
Stripe is a subprocessor for this flow and is listed at Subprocessors. Payment card data is handled by Stripe and does not transit or rest on UpliftOS systems.
7. Suspension, Termination, and the Money in Flight
We may suspend App Payments for an application that breaches our Acceptable Use Policy, is the subject of credible fraud or chargeback abuse, or where Stripe restricts the connected account. Where we can, we tell you first; where the risk is immediate, we tell you as soon as we have acted.
If your UpliftOS subscription ends, App Payments ends with it, because it is a platform facility. Money already in your Stripe account stays yours — it was never routed through us. Your relationship with Stripe, and your obligations to end users you have already charged, are unaffected by the end of your subscription with us.
8. Limits of This Document
Nothing here changes the warranty disclaimers, indemnities, or limitation of liability in our Terms of Service, which apply to App Payments in full. Nothing here is tax advice: whether you have a sales-tax, VAT, or GST obligation in a given jurisdiction, and whether any UpliftOS-side reporting applies to you, is yours to determine with your own advisers.
Questions about App Payments:
Legal: [email protected]
Billing: [email protected]