The stance
Payments are currently off across every Smart Astrologics product, including Spiritual Vedic Names. That's a deliberate stance, not a matter of "we haven't gotten around to it". But even though payments are off, they're ready — because the alternative is to ship monetisation in a panic, which is how you end up with a payments layer that's welded to whichever provider you chose first.
The shape of the work
Every piece of code that has anything to do with payments — subscriptions, one-off purchases, feature entitlements, receipt surfaces — is gated behind a feature flag. When the flag is off, those surfaces don't exist from the user's point of view. When the flag is on, they do.
The provider itself is also abstracted. The choice of merchant of record sits behind a configuration value, not a hard import. Swapping providers is a matter of flipping a config and regenerating a small amount of webhook plumbing, not rewriting the product.
Why build it now if it's off
Two reasons.
The first is that writing the payment layer when it's quiet means writing it carefully. Building payment integrations under time pressure, with real users depending on them, is how you end up with subtle bugs that cost real money.
The second is optionality. We don't know yet exactly how we want to charge. Subscription? One-time unlocks? Donations? Pay-what-you-want? We're not sure. Having the infrastructure sit ready-but-dormant lets us try different things when we're ready to try them, without treating every experiment as a code migration.