Fast onboarding with Stripe, PayPal, or Square feels like a win for high-risk merchants, but the real underwriting often happens later, without warning. Doing the risk review upfront, even if it takes months, is a tradeoff worth making deliberately.

Square and Stripe get lumped together constantly, but their identity verification timing, hold triggers, and negotiated pricing thresholds are genuinely different. Most merchants never find out which tradeoffs they actually agreed to.