Decision Center
Laboratory roadmap
Every recommendation here is either documentation-verified or lab-verified, and we tell you which. This roadmap shows exactly where each solution stands, so you understand why some answers are still provisional.
What the stages mean
Documentation review means we have read the vendor's own primary documentation and recorded what it does and does not say. Laboratory validation means we have set the solution up and run real transactions, refunds, and settlements ourselves. A finding is not "verified" until the lab confirms it; until then it is documentation-only or unknown.
Where each solution stands
Pending lab validation:
- US geoblock and signup behavior
- Cash Register acceptance end to end
- Synthetic-dollar balance behavior and regions
- Manual refund procedure
- POS reporting and export depth
Pending lab validation:
- Bank settlement qualification for a small merchant
- Auto-conversion BTC to USD end to end
- On-chain acceptance
- Lightning acceptance
- Full and partial refunds
- USD bank-transfer fee and timing
- Accounting export quality
- Mobile POS offline behavior
Pending lab validation:
- Self-hosted stack setup effort
- TPoS in-person acceptance
- Custody behavior per backend
- Accounting/CSV export
- Manual refund UX
- WebShop ecommerce maturity
Pending lab validation:
- US ineligibility confirmation
- All-in fee per fiat-settled sale
- Lightning and on-chain acceptance
- Refund workflow
- Reporting and accounting exports
- POS app offline behavior
Pending lab validation:
- Transaction fee
- Self-serve vs invite signup
- USDC acceptance end to end
- Bank off-ramp timing and fees
- Refund exposure in the merchant app
- Ecommerce plugin continuity from Commerce
- Multi-user roles and permissions
- Accounting export quality
Pending lab validation:
- Self-hosting setup effort (self-managed vs third-party host)
- On-chain acceptance end to end
- Lightning acceptance and node operations
- Refund via Pull Payments and rate options
- Store user roles and permissions
- Accounting export quality
- Offline / low-connectivity POS behavior
- Backup and recovery workflow
Pending lab validation:
- Standalone (non-Square) POS mode
- Own-node vs embedded custody and setup effort
- Lightning acceptance end to end
- Multi-operator workflow
- Refund procedure
- Reporting and exports
Pending lab validation:
- Business payout access for a small merchant
- Business fee schedule and conversion spread
- Lightning acceptance via API
- On-chain acceptance via API
- Refund tooling (if any)
- First-party acceptance product (if any)
- Multi-user roles and permissions
- Current country availability
Pending lab validation:
- Confirm it is a developer SDK, not a merchant product
- Spark fee schedule
- Provider-outage spendability
Pending lab validation:
- Sandbox account and API auth
- Lightning invoice end to end
- On-chain receive and custody model
- Fiat ramp behavior and regions
- Custody terms and US eligibility (in writing)
Every published solution here is documentation-verified with lab validation in progress. None has completed hands-on testing yet, which is why no cell in our comparison reads "Verified." As lab work finishes, findings move from documentation-only to verified, confidence rises, and these pages update, with a dated change log on each solution page.
How this changes what you read
When a solution's lab testing completes, three things happen: its "unknown" cells get real answers, its confidence marker can rise above "low," and its recommendation may change, in either direction. A solution can be lab-verified and still not recommended; verification is about certainty, not endorsement.