Phase 1: the first 1,000 merchants

Payments.lk is live, and for its first phase it is limited to 1,000 merchants. Places are first come first served: complete applications are reviewed in the order they arrive, and once 1,000 merchants are active, new applications wait for the next phase.

Why a limit at all

Because the thing we most want to get right at the start is support. A payment gateway is the part of your business you notice only when something is wrong, and when something is wrong you want a person, quickly, who can actually fix it. Our support team today is sized for 1,000 merchants at that standard. We would rather say so than take 10,000 sign-ups and answer them with a ticket queue.

A cap also lets us manage the rest of the operation properly: underwriting in days rather than weeks, verification reviews done by people who have read your file, terminals delivered configured, and enough headroom to fix what we learn from the first thousand before the next thousand arrive.

What it means for you

If you apply now and your application is complete, you are in the queue for phase 1. The Starter plan, sandbox keys and the dashboard work from the moment you start; the limit is on active merchants, not on who can look. If phase 1 fills before your application is reviewed, we tell you where you are in the queue and you keep your place for phase 2 automatically. Nothing about your pricing changes between phases: the rates on the pricing page are the rates.

What happens next

As the support team grows we open the next bucket. Phase 2 adds a further block of merchants, phase 3 after that, each announced here and on the dashboard, with the same first come first served rule. If you are already a merchant, none of this affects you; it only governs who joins and when.

The short version: we are starting deliberately small so that the experience is good, and we will tell you plainly when the next door opens.