Take payments without asking anyone’s permission.

When someone else decides

A card processor or a payment platform can refuse a business, freeze its balance or drop it, and it sets what you may sell. For a lawful shop that can mean losing the way to get paid overnight, because of a policy and not a law. Custodial crypto processors hold the money and bring rules and accounts of their own.

Taking payments yourself looks like the answer, then looks risky. Self-hosted payment servers usually keep spendable keys on the machine that faces the internet. When that machine or its application is compromised, the wallet is gone. That is a property of the design, not of any one bug.

What SatBooth does about it

• You decide what you sell and how you get paid. If it is legal, the law is your only rulebook.
• It runs on your machines. There is no vendor account to open and no telemetry. By default it calls no third party: your own bitcoind, your own monerod, your own Nostr relay. Fiat pricing is the one exception, and only when you turn it on.
• The public server holds almost nothing worth stealing. On-chain bitcoin is watch-only, Monero is view-only, and Lightning goes through a scoped, budgeted link to a small hub on another host. See what that bounds.
• It is open source under the Apache License 2.0, with signed releases you can verify. See how.

Who it is for

Merchants, creators and services that sell lawful goods and services and want control over how they are paid. A shop that a processor has dropped, or that fears being dropped. A business that wants Monero next to bitcoin. An operator who would rather not keep a hot wallet on a public server.

It suits someone who can run two hosts with Docker, or a developer who runs them for the shop. Your own application creates orders through SatBooth’s private API, and customers pay on SatBooth’s checkout page.

What you take on

• Two hosts, never one machine. A private hub host and a public host, joined by a private link you set up.
• Your own nodes. A dedicated bitcoind, a dedicated Alby Hub for Lightning, and monerod if you take Monero. The setup command writes their configuration.
• The costs of running them. The software is free and open source. Your hosts, your nodes and your channel liquidity are not free.
• The money you hold. You sweep Lightning funds from the hub to your main node or cold storage, and you pay on-chain and Monero refunds yourself, from your own wallet.
• A release candidate. The status line says: v0.1.0-rc.1 · release candidate · tested on regtest, not yet for real money

What SatBooth does not do

• It is not a hosted service. There is no SatBooth to sign up for.
• It has no stores: it is one merchant. It has no point-of-sale apps and no pull payments.
• It does not take card payments. Keep a card integration you already have on your side.
• It does not send on-chain or Monero refunds. A person pays those.

If you need stores, point-of-sale apps or pull payments, BTCPay Server does more. SatBooth is built for people who sell lawful goods and services, and it does less on purpose.