Money never lands in an owner wallet until your seat is confirmed. Here is exactly what happens between checkout and release.
Every Seatkin payment moves through an escrow hold before it reaches the group owner. The flow is the same for a five-dollar Spotify Family seat or an eighteen-hundred-naira Adobe Teams seat.
## What happens at checkout
When you pay, the funds are captured by the payment provider and immediately moved to a hold tied to the join request. The owner sees that the seat is paid for, but the money is not in their wallet yet. They cannot withdraw it.
## Confirming the seat
The owner provisions access in their tool's admin panel — adding your email to the Notion workspace, the Figma team, or the Apple Family group. Once you confirm that the seat works, the hold releases to the owner's wallet on a schedule set by the platform settings.
## When something goes wrong
If access fails or the owner stops responding, file a dispute from the group page. The hold stays put while our trust team reviews timestamps and event logs from both sides. Refunds happen by the same rails as payouts.
Escrow is the boring infrastructure that makes the rest of Seatkin possible.