Manifesto · Approve = Pay
Approval is Payment.
Send one link instead of an invoice. The client reviews. The client approves. Payment happens in the same flow — no second invoice, no second day. The card is charged by Stripe, on your account. Draftli never touches it.
Chapter One
The shape of the broken cycle.
You finish the work. You send the file. Then you open a separate tool and send a separate invoice. You wait.
The card sits in your client’s wallet. The invoice sits in their inbox under fourteen other emails. They meant to pay it Wednesday. It’s now Friday. A polite follow-up goes out. Then a less polite one. The client already loved the deliverable — the awkwardness has nothing to do with the work and everything to do with the gap between approved and paid.
Days. Sometimes a week or two. The work was finished a long time ago.
Invoice #0042
Brand identity — final round
Days since approval
- Mon
- Tue
- Wed
- Thu
- Fri
- Mon
- Tue
- Wed
Status
Approved. Unpaid. Waiting.
Chapter Two
The gap is invented.
Approval is the moment the client has decided. Asking them to repeat that decision a second time — in an invoicing app, days later — is a tax on attention.
The category called invoicing assumes payment must come after approval, in a separate step, on a separate day, in a separate piece of software. That assumption is what the category is for.
Draftli is not in that category.
Approval tool
“Looks great. Approved.”
Invoicing tool
Invoice draft — #0042
The whole industry, between the brackets.
Chapter · Two-and-a-Half
Where the money lives. Not in Draftli.
The Approve button starts a Stripe Checkout. The card goes from the client to Stripe. Stripe holds it for the seconds it takes to clear. Then it goes to your Stripe balance — your account, your name, your country.
Draftli is the workflow. Stripe is the money. We do not commingle, custody, or hold. The statement descriptor on your client’s card is your business name — not ours.
Client card
Stripe (PCI-DSS Level 1)
Your connected Stripe balance
Your bank
Draftli is not at any of these stops.
Chapter Three
The Approve button is the invoice.
The client opens a single share link. No account. No login. No detour. They see the work, watermarked. They drop pins. They leave notes. They request changes. When the work is right, they tap Approve.
Tap
One green button. The decision is the action.
Charge
Payment
Succeeded$1,200.00
Stripe Checkout, on your connected account. Draftli never holds the funds.
Unlock
Funds in your Stripe balance. Originals unlocked.
One link. Three steps. The whole loop.
The Approve button starts Stripe Checkout. Payment depends on the client completing Checkout.
Chapter Four
What is not in this product.
There is no invoicing step. There is no follow-up. There is no second tool to open, no second email to send, and no second decision to wait on.
There is no client login, because asking a client to make an account in order to pay you is friction at the wrong moment.
There is no separate tool for collecting payment after the fact, because there is no after.
The product is the absence of those things. That absence is what’s worth paying attention to.
- Invoicing step
- Invoice follow-up
- Client login
- Second tool
- “Hey, just bumping this up.”
What’s missing is the product.
What we believe
The category is approval-to-payment.
Creative work is finished when the client says it’s finished. Payment should follow immediately, because the decision to approve is the decision to pay. Software that puts a gap between those two decisions is software doing the wrong job.
The Approve button is the invoice. From feedback to funded — in a single conversation.
That is what Draftli is for.
Postscript
And now: deposit is also approval.
The original idea was simple: you don’t get paid until the client approves the work. But many creators ask for a deposit upfront — and that’s also a kind of approval. The client is approving the project beginning. Same mechanism, applied earlier.
So now Draftli supports both. Set a deposit when you create the project, and the client pays the deposit before they can see the work. They review, they comment, and when they approve, they pay the balance. Two approvals, two payments, both directly to your Stripe account — the same direct-charge flow, with Draftli never acting as the payment processor for either.
Approval is Payment. From deposit to delivery.