Who these terms are with
pay.ifinsta.online is a payment orchestrator operated by ifinsta (the operator). These terms are between you and the operator, and they cover your use of this service, its merchant dashboard and its back office. The software behind it is developed in the open; the licence stated with that software governs the code, not the service.
What the service does, and what it never does
The service instructs a business's own provider account to collect a payment, learns the outcome, and tells the merchant. It never holds, pools or pays out merchant money, and it never holds payer funds. Money moves between payers, providers and businesses under the provider's own terms; the service moves no money itself. It records no fee of its own in this release: what a provider reports as its fee is recorded and shown as reported.
Accounts and access
- Merchants sign in to the dashboard through ifinsta.com's identity service. The identity service owns passwords and two-step verification; this service owns only its own sessions.
- API keys are issued to a business and are that business's responsibility to keep secret. A key leaked is a key for the business's money-moving actions until it is revoked, and revoked keys stop working at once.
- Operator access to the back office is granted to named people and can be revoked. Actions taken under it are recorded in the audit trail with the name of the person who made them.
Acceptable use
A business may not use the service to collect for goods or services that are illegal where the business or its payers are; to impersonate another business, a bank, a payment provider or ifinsta; to sell what it does not have or take payment it will not honour; to launder money or collect for someone else without saying so; or for anything its own provider's terms forbid.
An operator may suspend a business at once when it must. Suspension needs a written reason naming what the business did, and it is recorded in the audit trail with the operator's name. While suspended, a business takes no new checkouts and starts no new attempts; payments already made are untouched, and refunds can still be asked for and approved, so payers are not left out of pocket. The business is told on its dashboard, and resumption is recorded the same way.
Payments and refunds
- One checkout, one amount. The amount is fixed when a checkout is created; the hosted page asks for that amount once. A business deliberately asking twice for the same reference with different amounts gets a refusal, not a second payment.
- At most one attempt can succeed per checkout. What the provider reports is what is recorded; the service is the record of the attempt, not the provider's account balance.
- Refunds are bounded by what was confirmed collected. A refund the provider refuses stays visible as refused. A refund handled outside the engine, such as cash, is recorded with the name of whoever handled it.
The record, and what happens to it
The service keeps an append-only history for checkouts, attempts and refunds, delivers signed events, and closes finished days for reconciliation. The privacy page describes exactly what is stored, what leaves the service, and for how long.
Availability
The service is provided as it is, while the operator keeps it running. An operator may pause accepting new checkouts to protect a failing provider or a market, and the dashboard and back office say plainly when something is paused and why. Nothing on this site is an uptime promise; the honest statement is on the status of each payment, which the record keeps whether the news is good or bad.
Changes
Changes to this release of the service, including to what these terms describe, are announced in the changelog. Continued use after a change is acceptance of it. If you do not accept a change, stop using the service and revoke your keys.
Contact
Questions about these terms: contact the project. Vulnerabilities go through the security policy, never a public issue.