Connecting Stripe
Stripe Connect is how money moves: parents pay your studio, payouts land in your bank, and our all-inclusive platform fee (1.5% capped at $6 for bank payments, 3.3% + 30¢ for cards) comes out at charge time. Setup is usually under 10 minutes.
1. Start the Stripe Express onboarding
From the admin dashboard, click Connect Stripe. You'll be redirected to a Stripe-hosted form to provide your business details: legal name, address, EIN or SSN (for sole proprietors), and a bank account for payouts. Stripe owns this flow entirely — Full Out never sees the sensitive fields.
2. What Stripe asks for
- Business legal name + structure (sole prop, LLC, corp)
- Tax ID (EIN for businesses, SSN for sole prop)
- Business address + phone
- A bank account (routing + account number)
- A representative (you, or a business officer)
Once submitted, Stripe usually approves within minutes. Occasionally they request additional verification — they'll email you directly.
3. The platform fee — processing included
One all-inclusive fee comes out of each charge at charge time. We pay Stripe's processing costs out of it — there are no separate Stripe fees on top:
- Bank payments (ACH): 1.5%, capped at $6 — collecting $200 tuition costs $3.00, and a $1,000 costume bill still costs just $6
- Cards: 3.3% + 30¢ per transaction
- Sales tax you collect is excluded from the fee — we never take a percentage of tax you remit to the state
- The remainder lands in your Stripe balance and pays out on Stripe's schedule
You never get an invoice from us. If a parent doesn't pay, neither does your studio: no monthly subscription, no per-student charges, ever. Parents choose bank or card at checkout — encouraging bank payments is the easiest way to lower your fees.
4. Payouts
Stripe's standard payout schedule for US accounts is 2 business days after a charge clears. Funds move directly from your Stripe balance to your verified bank account — Full Out never holds your money.
Stripe offers Instant Payouts (1% fee, available within minutes) for accounts that opt in. Configure this from the Stripe dashboard's Payouts tab if you want it.
5. If Stripe rejects your account
Rejection is rare but possible — usually a mismatched tax ID, an unverifiable address, or a business category Stripe considers high-risk. Stripe will email you the reason. The fix is almost always to resubmit with corrected info from your Stripe dashboard's Account → Onboarding tab.
While Stripe is investigating, you can keep using the admin (creating classes, adding families) — you just can't accept payments until the account is approved. Your public catalog stays hidden until charges are enabled.