What actually makes the badge worth something

Anonymity

The business a review is about is also the party with a reason to retaliate — it controls the Stripe account, and it could cancel or pressure a customer it identifies as the author of a bad review. So Bona never tells a business who wrote what. A business sees exactly what everyone else sees on the public profile — a rating and the review text — nothing more, and never a name, an email, or anything else that traces back to a person.

There's no opt-in "let the business contact me" feature either, even with a reviewer's consent. Once that door exists, a business can dangle a refund or a fix in exchange for changing a review — the same leverage anonymity was supposed to remove. If a reviewer wants to follow up with a business directly, that's always their call to make outside Bona, on their own terms.

A reviewer's past reviews for the same business still link together — so a business can see someone updated their opinion over time — but only through a one-way hash of their Stripe customer ID, never the ID itself. There's no path from that hash back to a name.

Bona doesn't retain anything that identifies a reviewer, even internally. The invoice number and Stripe customer ID exist only long enough to verify the purchase and issue a one-time link, then get reduced to one-way hashes. Even the email address used to deliver that link is never written to a database — it's handed straight to the delivery job and never stored.

Verification

A business connects Bona to its own Stripe account with a key scoped to read-only access — Bona can look up customers, subscriptions, invoices, and charges, and nothing else. It can't charge, refund, or change anything. See the Stripe connection walkthrough for exactly what that key can and can't do.

A review request only goes anywhere once Bona confirms, directly against that Stripe data, that the invoice number given is real and was actually paid — not a free trial, not a typo, not a number the business made up.

Even then, nobody fills out a review form directly. Bona emails a one-time link and code to the billing email Stripe has on file for that invoice — completing a review proves the person doing it controls that inbox, not just that they know an invoice number. The link and code are single-use and expire after a few hours.

Integrity

Once a review is verified and published, it stays published. A business cannot ask Bona to remove, hide, or edit a review because it doesn't like what it says — not as a favor, not for any plan tier, not ever. This is binding the moment a business signs up, for every review it receives, including from customers who've since canceled. See Review integrity in the Terms for the exact commitment.

If a reviewer updates their opinion later, the earlier review isn't deleted to make room for it — it's kept and marked as an earlier review, visible to anyone who clicks through a customer's history. Only the most recent one counts toward the business's rating.

And pricing never varies with sentiment. There's no tier where a business pays more to make an unflattering review go away, because there's nothing to buy — the review stays regardless of what plan a business is on.