New payment forms start as drafts. A draft cannot take a payment — it's your working copy until you decide to go live, and it says so everywhere it appears.
Video walkthrough
Drafts and publishing in a little over a minute: where the Draft label shows, what a payer sees on a draft's link, and what Publish hands you.
How drafts and publishing work
While you're building a form, click Save at any point to keep your progress. The form stays a Draft — you'll see the Draft badge next to its title in the builder, under the title on the form's details page, and on your Payment Forms page.
A draft already has its public link. If someone opens it, they'll see the first step of checkout — handy for checking your own work — but the form will stop them before they can pay. No half-finished form can quietly collect money because somebody had the link.
When the form is ready, click Publish (at the top of the page in the Modern builder, or at the end of the Step by step builder). Publishing makes the form live so payers can check out on it, and hands you what you need next: the link to send, the code to embed, and a QR code to print. The link is the same one the draft had — it simply works now. A form needs at least a title and one amount before it can be published.
On your Payment Forms page, the status filters show how many forms are in each state — Draft, Active, Disabled, and more — and let you view one group at a time.
Once a form is live, edits work the same way: Save stores your changes as unpublished, payers keep getting the published version, and your changes go live when you click Publish. There's never a need to update your form's links or embed codes.