cartt.io vs Stripe Payment Links: More Than a Pay Button

Stripe Payment Links are free, take ~30 seconds to set up, and work for ~80% of sellers' first checkout. They're a great starting point. They are not a great long-term solution.

This is the honest comparison: when Stripe Payment Links are enough, and when cartt.io's checkout adds enough value to justify a $9–19/month subscription.

What Stripe Payment Links give you

A hosted checkout URL — Stripe builds it, hosts it, and processes it
Multiple products + quantity selection
Discount codes
Tax collection (Stripe Tax)
Shipping rates (basic)
Subscription support
Apple Pay / Google Pay
$0 platform fee — only Stripe's ~2.9% + $0.30 processing fee

That's a real checkout. If your only requirement is "I need to take a payment for this product," Payment Links solve the problem for free.

What Stripe Payment Links don't give you

A page that looks like your brand. Payment Links live on buy.stripe.com/.... You can customize colors and your logo. You can't customize layout, hero copy, product description position, or anything below the fold. There is no "below the fold" — it's a payment form.
A landing page. Payment Links are checkout pages, not sales pages. If you need a hero, features list, testimonials, FAQ, social proof — Payment Links don't have a place to put them. You need a separate landing page that links to the Payment Link.
Real urgency. No countdown timers. No "X seats left." No cohort enrollment windows.
Order bumps. You can sell multiple products in a Payment Link, but the buyer chooses among them — there's no "add the bonus pack for $19?" checkbox at the bottom.
Post-purchase upsells. Once payment processes, Stripe shows a generic confirmation. You can redirect, but you can't pitch an upsell on a Stripe-hosted screen.
UGC galleries, social proof bars, live alerts. Pure checkout, no surrounding sales infrastructure.
Custom domain (without a separate landing page). Payment Links live on buy.stripe.com. You'd need to wrap them in your own landing page on your own domain.

The decision framework

Stripe Payment Links are right if:

You have a hot audience (newsletter, social, podcast) and just need to take payment
Your product sells itself — the marketing happens elsewhere and the checkout is just the transaction
You're testing if a product has demand before investing in a checkout page
Your buyer already knows what they want when they click the link

cartt.io is right if:

You need a checkout page that also sells (combines landing + checkout in one)
You want order bumps and post-purchase upsells without engineering work
You want real urgency (cohort timers, enrollment windows)
You want UGC, social proof, recent-purchase alerts visible at checkout
Your buyer needs to be convinced on the page before paying

The math

Stripe Payment Links: $0/month + Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.

cartt.io: $9–19/month + Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction (Stripe still processes; cartt.io takes 0%).

At 100 sales/month on a $50 product:

Stripe Payment Links: $145 in Stripe fees. Net to you: $4,855.
cartt.io: $145 in Stripe fees + $9–19 subscription = ~$155. Net to you: $4,845.

The cartt.io subscription costs you ~$10–25/month. If cartt.io's conversion improvements (urgency, order bumps, social proof, faster checkout) lift conversion by even 1%, you recover the subscription on the first sale of the month. Most cartt.io users see conversion lifts of 5–20% over Payment Links on the same product, primarily from order bumps and the integrated landing-page-plus-checkout layout.

When to start with Payment Links

If you have an unvalidated product and want to know if anyone will pay before building a checkout page: start with Stripe Payment Links. If you get sales, you've validated demand. Then graduate to a proper checkout when conversion optimization becomes the bottleneck.

That's actually the recommended path. Don't build a fancy checkout for a product nobody wants. Build the cheapest possible "can I get paid?" infrastructure, then upgrade once payments are flowing.

When to graduate

You've outgrown Payment Links when:

You're spending time building landing pages elsewhere that link out to Stripe — at that point you're maintaining two systems
You want order bumps or upsells, which Payment Links don't have
You're losing sales to a generic-looking checkout that doesn't match your brand
Your buyers ask "is this legit?" because the URL is buy.stripe.com instead of your domain
You want to run cohort launches with real enrollment windows

If any two of those apply, the cartt.io subscription pays for itself.

If you've outgrown Payment Links and want a real checkout page in about five minutes: start free or see the full comparison.