They Don't Get the File Until They Pay: How I Built a Payment-Gated Delivery System

I've built a lot of things to solve my own problems. This one might be the most useful. After years of delivering work first and chasing payments second — sometimes never getting paid at all — I stopped accepting it as a workflow issue and started treating it as an architecture problem . The result is LinkVault : a payment-gated file delivery layer where clients preview work in a secure viewer, pay via Stripe, and the file unlocks automatically. No manual release. No invoice follow-up. No trust