Ship Payments, Not Boilerplate: Getting Started with Surfboard in Hours - Knowledge Hub

Most payment integrations start the same way. You open the docs. The docs are a 400-page PDF last updated in 2021. There are three SDKs, none of which match the API version your account was provisioned on. You email support. Support replies in four business days with a link to the same PDF.

We built Surfboard to kill that workflow.

One API. Every Channel.

Surfboard gives you a single REST API that covers in-store terminals, online checkout, SoftPOS (Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android), and unattended devices. You do not need separate integrations for separate channels. One integration, one set of credentials, one data model.

That is not a marketing abstraction. It is the literal architecture. The same payment application runs on EMV hardware and SoftPOS devices. When you build against our API, you are building against one surface — whether the transaction happens on a SurfPrint Pro at a restaurant counter or through a hosted payment page on a customer’s phone.

New: Step-by-Step Integration Guides

We just shipped a set of integration guides designed to get you from sandbox to production as fast as possible.

These are not conceptual overviews. They are opinionated, sequential walkthroughs:

Get your sandbox credentials. Sign up and get immediate API access. No sales call required to start building.
Make your first API call. Create a merchant, configure a store, pair a terminal — all through the API.
Accept a payment. Trigger a transaction on a test terminal or a hosted checkout page.
Go live. Switch to production credentials and process real money.

Our current record is 5 hours from signup to a live terminal processing real transactions. That is not a best-case hypothetical. It happened.

Built for How Developers Actually Work Now

The Surfboard Developer Portal is the canonical reference for every endpoint, webhook, and object in the platform. Full OpenAPI specs, sandbox access, and interactive API exploration.

But we also know that in 2026, a lot of developers are not reading docs linearly. They are asking an LLM to help them scaffold an integration, debug a webhook payload, or generate a client.

So we built for that.

`llms.txt` — Structured Context for AI Assistants

We publish an llms.txt file in our developer portal documentation. This is a structured, machine-readable representation of our API documentation designed for large language models.

Point your AI coding assistant at it, and it gets clean, current context about our endpoints, authentication patterns, object schemas, and integration flows. No more pasting half a docs page into ChatGPT and hoping it hallucinates the right field name. The LLM gets the real spec.

MCP Support

We also support the Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the Developer Portal. If you are building agentic workflows — or just using an MCP-compatible coding tool — you can connect directly to Surfboard’s API context.

Your agent gets access to the same structured documentation, which means it can reason about payment flows, generate correct API calls, and stay in sync with our latest schema.

This is not a gimmick. Agentic commerce is a real integration pattern. AI agents that create orders, trigger payments, and manage the transaction lifecycle need reliable, structured API context. MCP and llms.txt are how we deliver that.

What the Integration Actually Looks Like

Here is the mental model:

Sign up at the Developer Portal. You get sandbox credentials instantly.
Read the guides. They walk you through merchant creation, store configuration, terminal pairing, and payment initiation.
Build. Use our SDKs, hosted pages, or go server-to-server. One integration covers every payment channel.
Test. Full sandbox environment. Every endpoint, every payment flow.
Go live. Production credentials, real transactions. Same-day if you move fast.

No six-month onboarding projects. No vendor ping-pong. No PDFs.

Why This Matters for ISVs and Software Providers

If you are an ISV embedding payments into your product, integration speed is not a nice-to-have. Every week you spend wrestling with a payment provider’s API is a week you are not shipping your core product.

Surfboard is a white-label platform. Your merchants see your brand, not ours. You get a unified API that covers physical terminals, online checkout, and mobile SoftPOS. You get merchant onboarding through the API — no paperwork loops, no manual provisioning.

And now you get guides, llms.txt, and MCP support so your engineering team can move at the speed they are used to.

The infrastructure is cloud-native, multi-cloud (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure), PCI DSS certified, and runs at 99.99% uptime.

Get Started

Developer Portal — API reference, sandbox, and interactive exploration.
Integration Guides — Step-by-step walkthroughs from sandbox to live.
llms.txt — Structured API context for AI coding assistants.
Developers Overview — MCP support, tooling, and everything else.

Stop reading PDFs. Start shipping payments.