Payment connectors

Connecting a processor per environment, why sandbox and production are separate connections, and what happens to live payments if billing lapses.

A connector is the link between Throttle and whatever actually moves money. Until one is connected and active, nothing can be charged.

One connection per environment

Connections are environment-scoped like everything else. Your sandbox environments hold connections pointed at the processor’s sandbox; production holds a connection pointed at the processor’s live account.

This is not a toggle on a single connection — they are separate records with separate credentials. Connecting a processor in test does nothing for production, which is the point: a mistake in a sandbox cannot reach real money.

Getting to production

An active production connection is one of the four preconditions for going live. Present-but-inactive does not count.

The other three are an entitled subscription, at least one application, and a production-terms acceptance less than five minutes old. The go-live call returns a requirements array naming exactly which ones you failed, so you never have to guess. Full walkthrough in Set up a workspace and go live.

What happens if billing lapses

Losing production entitlement — a cancelled or unpaid subscription — sets the production connection inactive rather than deleting anything.

This is a read-only freeze, not a teardown. The processor sub-account and all production data are preserved; live-mode resolution simply stops finding a connection, so no new live transactions can run. Re-subscribing reactivates the same rows and you carry on. Nothing needs reconnecting.

Sandbox connections are unaffected, so a workspace that lapses can still develop and test.

Using a live-mode key without entitlement returns 402 workspace_not_entitled_for_live — an explicit refusal rather than a silent failure or an empty result.

Simulators

New applications come with card and PayPal simulators enabled, so the embed renders and a test checkout completes before you have connected anything real. They exist to prove the integration works end to end; they never touch a processor.

Multiple processors and routing

More than one connector can be active, with rules deciding which one handles a given payment — ordered cascades that can branch on attributes like card country or payment source, so a failure on one route can fall through to another.

This is worth setting up deliberately rather than by default. A cascade that retries a hard decline just adds latency to a payment that was never going to succeed.

Connecting Stripe

Stripe can be connected through a standard Connect OAuth flow — the merchant authorizes Throttle and no keys are pasted anywhere.

Connecting is not the same as charging. A Stripe Connect connection completes successfully today, but taking live card payments through that path is still gated on a separate approval. If you are planning to launch on Stripe specifically, confirm the current state before you build a timeline on it.

  • API keys and environments — Reading a Throttle key at a glance, why a publishable key can only do two things, and how keys bind to one workspace environment for life.
  • What Throttle stores — The objects Throttle owns, the one thing it deliberately does not store, and how workspace, application, and environment scope everything else.

Last updated August 9, 2026