Spending a lot of time in Stripe recently. It’s a fantastic payment gateway and a pleasure to use, compared to something like PayPal which really does show its age.

But it’s so stressful and confusing dealing with money and subscriptions. The biggest uncertainty is dealing with anything that takes time. The problem I’m facing now is if the customer chooses to buy something like a database, which is billed a flat fee every month, and then they choose to buy another database during the billing period, can I track that with a single subscription and simply adjust the quantity amount? My current research suggests that I can, and that Stripe will handle the prorating of partial payments and credits. They even have a nice API to preview the next invoice which can be used to show the customer how much they will be paying for.

But despite all the documentation, test environments, and simulations, I still can’t be sure that it will happen in real life, when real money is exchanged in real time. I guess some real life testing would be required. 💸