The payments layer we reach for first
Partner
Stripe is our default, not our only answer. The primitives map to how businesses actually bill rather than to how a payments company would prefer to model it: customers, subscriptions, invoices, connected accounts.
We reach for it hardest on subscription commerce, where the billing logic is the difficult part and the checkout is not.
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The grain
What we have learned billing on Stripe
- Subscriptions are the real reason
Both builds below are subscription businesses. Stripe's billing objects handle proration, trials, plan changes and failed payment retries, which is exactly where hand rolled implementations quietly fall apart. Writing that yourself is a year of edge cases you discover in production.
- It is not the cheapest way to take a card
Interchange plus a per transaction fee adds up, and at real volume a negotiated rate elsewhere will beat it. What the difference buys is engineering time you never spend on billing edge cases. That trade is good until it isn't, and volume is what flips it.
- Not every project needs it
When a client takes donations or sells a handful of products, Square Web Payments is less machinery to own. When they already run a commerce platform with its own gateway, adding Stripe means a second system to reconcile against. Neither is a Stripe problem.
- Webhooks are where implementations break
Payment state lives on Stripe's side, so your database is a cache of it and caches go stale. Handlers have to be idempotent, signatures have to be verified, and something has to reconcile on a schedule rather than trusting one delivery to arrive.
- Test mode is most of the developer experience
Deterministic test cards, replayable webhook events, and a dashboard showing the same objects your code sees. That is the difference between shipping a billing change with confidence and shipping one while hoping.
We are listed in the Stripe partner directory, which mostly means we have shipped enough of these to know where the sharp edges are.
If you are choosing a processor, the question worth asking first is whether billing is the hard part of your business. If it is, this is the right tool and the fee is worth it. If you only need to take a card on a page, there are lighter options, and we will say so.
