Questions, answered honestly.

Nothing per month. There is no subscription, no terminal rental, no monthly minimum and no contract. On a card payment you pay PayLeaf 0.5% plus Stripe's standard processing rate. On a $100 payment that works out to $3.70 in total fees — $0.50 to PayLeaf and $3.20 to Stripe — leaving $96.30 in your bank account. Your customer pays exactly $100.

No. Your customer pays exactly the amount on the invoice or the sale, and PayLeaf never adds a surcharge, convenience fee or rounding at checkout. The fees come out of your side of the transaction before payout.

Wherever it is offered, yes — and the gap widens as the invoice grows. Pay by bank is a single all-in 1.5% with a $5 minimum, available on invoices of $250 or more. On a $1,000 invoice a card costs you $34.30 in total fees while bank costs $15.00, so you keep $19.30 more; on $5,000 you keep $95.30 more. The trade-off is time, not money: a bank debit takes three to five business days to clear, where a card settles at once. Note that the $5 minimum means a $250 invoice effectively pays 2.00% rather than 1.5%.

Yes to both. PayLeaf is free to download and free to keep, and in a month where you take no payments it costs you nothing. There is no contract and no cancellation fee — you can stop using it, or delete your account entirely, at no cost and without notice.

Card payments settle immediately and Stripe pays out to your bank account in roughly two business days. Bank payments are a pre-authorized debit and take three to five business days to clear before payout begins. Payouts go to the Canadian bank account you connect during Stripe onboarding.

Stripe. PayLeaf never holds, pools or moves your funds. Every payment is processed by Stripe and paid out by Stripe directly into your own bank account. PayLeaf is a business payment tool, not a bank, wallet or money-transfer service, and it cannot move money out of your account.

No card details ever touch PayLeaf. The payment page is hosted and processed by Stripe, a PCI-certified payment processor, so card numbers go from your customer straight to Stripe. PayLeaf only receives the result — paid or not paid — and the amount.

Stripe notifies PayLeaf the moment a payment settles, and the invoice flips from unpaid to paid on its own. You get a push notification, your customer gets an email receipt, and the payment appears in your history. A settled invoice cannot be paid twice, so a customer who revisits an old link cannot pay you again by accident.

A pre-authorized debit can be returned for insufficient funds, a closed account or a revoked authorization. When that happens PayLeaf reopens the invoice as unpaid automatically, notifies you, and makes the payment link usable again so your customer can retry or pay by card instead. No PayLeaf fee is charged on a payment that never cleared.

You issue a refund from the app and the money goes back to the card your customer paid with. How the original processing fee is treated follows Stripe's published refund policy for your account, which PayLeaf does not control or mark up.

No. They point their phone's normal camera at your QR code, or tap the link you sent, and pay in their browser. There is nothing to download and no account to create. That is true for card payments and for pay by bank.

Not directly, and it is worth being clear about why. Interac debit runs on its own domestic network, which is not available for this kind of online or QR checkout, so a debit card carrying only the Interac logo will not go through. Cards that also run on Visa or Mastercard — Visa Debit and Debit Mastercard, which most Canadian banks now issue — do work, as do credit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. If a customer specifically wants to pay from their bank account, pay by bank covers that on invoices of $250 or more.

You toggle the taxes that apply to a sale or invoice and PayLeaf calculates them on the subtotal, shows them as their own lines, and includes them in the total your customer pays. Your GST/HST registration number appears on invoice PDFs. Collecting the tax is handled for you; registering with the CRA and remitting what you collect remains your responsibility.

Every payment and invoice stays in your history with the date, amount, customer and status. You can download PDF receipts and invoices, and pull reports covering a period you choose. Because the paid status is set by the actual payment rather than by hand, the record matches your bank statement.

A phone, a Canadian business or sole-proprietor identity, and a Canadian bank account. You download the app, create an account, and complete Stripe's onboarding — Stripe verifies your identity and business details, which is what lets it pay out to you. Most vendors are taking payments the same afternoon.