# Payment gateways

Streams Manager offers two payment options for your users:

* Pay as you go - users pay when their subscription is close to expiring, they can pre-pay ahead of time, etc.
* Recurring - recurring payments that are automatically charged by the payment gateway

In addition, Streams Manger offers three payment gateways for payment collection:

* [PayPal](https://paypal.com/) – both PayPal personal account and PayPal business account are supported although PayPal business account is required for recurring payments on Streams Manager. PayPal changes 3.49% fee + 0.49 USD (in the US) on each transaction and you will get an income tax statement (1099-K) if you are in the United States if you make more than 600 USD per year. It is likely that there are similar tax implications in other countries
* [Stripe](https://stripe.com/) – offers both pay as you go and recurring payments. They charge 2.9% fee plus 0.30 USD on each transaction. This has the same tax implications as PayPal
* [Plisio](https://plisio.net/) – crypto gateway that offers only pay as you go payments via crypto coins. They charge 0.5% which is the lowest of the bunch

Lastly, Streams Manager also offers **manual payment management** where an administrator can manually enter information about payments they receive via other means such as different payment apps such as Venmo and CashApp.

#### Options for payment management <a href="#options-for-payment-management" id="options-for-payment-management"></a>

Administrators have several options when it comes to managing payments through Streams Manager.

* Your users use Streams Manager to make payments using PayPal, Stripe or Plisio. This method offers full integration and automation. If you have a PayPal personal or business account, Stripe account or Plisio account, you can enable any or all of those options which will allow your users to register and pay on the website and payments will be automatically entered into the system for you and media server access provisioned to the user. From there, automatic reminders, removal or users if their payment lapses etc. is all done automatically. If users are using recurring payments, you can enable transaction sync and payments charged by the payment gateway will be automatically entered into the system which will extend user’s subscription. Completely hands off but incurs fees from PayPal, Stripe and Plisio.
* Users send payments via PayPal to a personal PayPal account using fee free ways.  This method also offers full integration and automation. If you want to avoid fees (and taxes) and if you have a PayPal personal account (business will not work), instruct your users to send you payments using fee free ways (i.e. send to friend or send gift), add the user to the system manually initially (invite via Users panel), enable transaction sync and payments will be automatically entered into the system for you once received and user’s subscriptions extended. From there, automatic reminders, removal or users if their payment lapses etc. is all done automatically. This obviously does not allow for recurring payments so users all have to manually send you money every pay period. The system will import the payments but this causes some people to forget, causes their subscription to lapse etc. Stripe also does not support this as they always take fees. Via PayPal personal account though, there are no fees.
* Manual payment entry. You manually enter payments you receive via any other means (cash, another payment app such as CashApp, Venmo, Patreon, ApplePay, etc.). By entering the payment manually, you will extend the subscription for the user. The system takes care of the rest as mentioned in the previous options.
