The awkward part is asking. The rest is a link.

The site is finished. It looks good. You sent it over and they loved it.

Four days later, the money still isn't in your account. The invoice is sitting in your drafts. Every day you decide you'll send it tomorrow.

That is where the money goes missing. Not on building the site. On asking for it.

Nobody quits this business because the websites were too hard. They quit because asking for money feels awful, so they stop doing it.

Here is how it should work instead.

One link. Both charges.

A website is really two charges.

There is the build. That is a one-off payment for the work you did. Then there is the monthly, which keeps the site online, updated, and showing up on Google.

Doing that by hand is where it falls apart. Send the first invoice. Remember to start the monthly. Remember again next month. Then again, for every client you have. Forget once and you just worked a month for free.

Here it is one link. Open the client's row, tap the price you agreed, and send it.

They get a normal payment page. Card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, whatever they already use. They pay for the build right there.

The monthly does not start today. It starts on the 1st of next month, and they are not charged anything strange for the days in between. So they pay you for the build now, and the monthly bill begins on the first, like every other bill they have.

You didn't check a calendar. You didn't send a second link.

Nothing to set up in Stripe

This is the part that normally eats an afternoon. Making products. Copying long codes. Pasting them somewhere. Getting one wrong and not knowing which.

You don't do any of that. The prices are already there. When you send the link, you tap which one you agreed with this client, and that is what they get charged.

Changed your mind on price? Tap a different one next time.

It won't let you send a broken link

Small thing. It matters a lot on the day it saves you.

• Forgot to tell the dashboard your own web address? It stops you. Otherwise your client pays and lands on a dead page.
• Forgot to pick a price? It stops you, instead of sending an empty payment page.

Every link you send is written down: who sent it, what was on it, and what it said the price was. That matters the day someone else is sending links for you. "Somebody quoted him something" becomes "here is exactly what we quoted, and when".

Signed is not the same as paid

Here is the part that keeps you honest with yourself.

Until the money actually lands, the dashboard will not call them a paying client. They are signed. That is a different row and a different number, because someone saying yes is not the same as someone paying.

When the money does land, three things happen on their own:

1. They move to paid, or to active if they are on the monthly.
2. Their card, their monthly plan and their receipts all show up on their row. You don't go digging through another app to find them.
3. Their site turns itself on. Client sites stay locked until they are paid for. The moment the money lands, the lock comes off and the site goes live.

You didn't email anyone a login. You didn't open a hosting account. You didn't flip a switch. They paid, and their website went live.

The money comes straight to you

It runs on your own payment account, with your own login. The money goes from your client to your bank. We never hold it and we never take a cut of it. You buy the software once and it is yours.

That is the difference between owning your tools and renting them. The rented ones charge you $97 to $300 every single month, forever, whether you signed a client that month or not.

No card payments? Still fine

Card payments aren't available in every country, and plenty of people would rather take a bank transfer or cash.

That works too, and you lose nothing. Take the money however you like, mark them as paid, and everything above still happens. They move to paid. Their site goes live.

The point

Nobody gets rich because their invoices looked tidy.

But you will lose clients, and months, and the trust of people who liked you, if getting paid is one more thing you have to remember to do.

Make it one link you send once. Then go build the next site.