Let customers decide what to pay

Accept tips and donations, or sell pay-what-you-want products and services.

You can use this feature to collect a tip for a service provided, accept donations for a cause, or give your customers the option to pay what they want for your product or service. Go to Stripe Support to learn more about Stripe’s requirements for accepting tips or donations.

Pay-what-you-want payments have the following limitations:

You can’t use promotion codes or discounts with them.
They don’t support recurring payments.

Set up your product catalog

Stripe Checkout uses Products and Prices to structure pay-what-you-want payments. In the following example, Togethere is selling tickets to a fundraising dinner and wants to allow their customers to pay what they want for their tickets.

To create a pay-what-you-want model on Stripe through the Dashboard, complete these steps:

Create the Fundraising dinner product.
1. Go to the Products tab.
2. Click +Add product.
3. Enter the Name of the product (Fundraising dinner).
4. (Optional) Add a Description. The customer sees the description at checkout.
Create the price for the Fundraising dinner product:
1. Select Customer chooses price for the Pricing model.
2. (Optional) Add a suggested price.
3. (Optional) Specify limits that the customer can input.
4. Click Save product.

Create a Checkout Session

To enable customers to change the amount on the payment page, use the price ID when you create a Checkout Session. If you select Customer chooses price as your pricing model, you can’t add any other line items and the quantity can only be 1.

Command Line

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/checkout/sessions \
  -u sk_test_4eC39HqLyjWDarjtT1zdp7dc: \
  -d cancel_url="https://example.com" \
  -d "line_items[0][price]"={{PRICE_ID}} \
  -d "line_items[0][quantity]"=1 \
  -d mode=payment \
  -d success_url="https://example.com"