Stripe Connect Architecture

When you set up payouts on BrightStar, you're plugged into Stripe Connect, running in what's called "destination charges" mode. This is the architecture that lets a kirtan circle collecting money at the door, a retreat center taking a deposit on a weekend program, or a festival selling weekend passes all get paid in real time, while BrightStar still keeps a full record of every charge and the ability to step in on a refund if something goes wrong after the gate closes. Because the whole flow — the split, the transfer, and the eventual payout to your bank — happens inside a single charge rather than as separate manual steps, there's less room for money to go missing between the moment someone buys a ticket and the moment it shows up in your account. Understanding how that single charge splits, and where the money sits at each moment, answers most of the questions you'll have about your payouts and about writing a refund policy that actually matches what you get back.

The split you see above isn't calculated after the sale — it's written into the Payment Intent the moment the charge is created. BrightStar passes an application fee amount alongside the transfer destination, which is your connected Stripe account. Stripe treats both as instructions for one transaction: it takes its own processing cost, routes BrightStar's application fee back to the platform, and sends what's left to you, all inside the same charge. Because the split is fixed at charge creation rather than reconciled afterward, there's no separate transfer step where money has to move between accounts once the sale closes, and no point where the split could come out differently than what was quoted at checkout.

Two different clocks matter here, and it helps to keep them apart. The move from the customer's card to BrightStar's platform account, and from that platform account into your connected Stripe account, both happen inside the same charge — effectively immediate, measured in milliseconds rather than days. The move from your Stripe balance into your actual bank account is the part with a real wait: on an Express account, Stripe pays out automatically every 2 to 3 business days, while on a Standard account you set your own schedule — daily, weekly, or manual. If you need funds sooner than your schedule allows, an instant payout is available for roughly a 1 percent fee and lands within minutes instead of days.

A refund on BrightStar doesn't just hand back cash — it unwinds the same split that created the original charge. On a full refund, the customer gets back everything they paid, and BrightStar's platform fee is returned to the platform along with it. What doesn't come back is the Stripe processing fee: Stripe keeps that regardless of whether the charge is later refunded. So the real cost of a full refund to you as the organizer is limited to that processing fee rather than the entire ticket price. A partial refund works the same way at a smaller scale — the amount returned is proportional to what was refunded, and BrightStar recalculates the platform fee based on the new, smaller total instead of the original one.