What it is
Stripe is a payments platform for businesses that sell online. It handles card payments, subscriptions, invoices and payouts through a developer API, plus hosted pages such as Checkout and the customer Billing Portal. A business can take a card without the card number ever reaching its own servers, which keeps its compliance scope small.
For software companies, Stripe Billing is the part that matters most. It models products, prices, trials and plan changes, works out proration, retries failed cards and sends webhook events when a subscription changes state. Stripe Tax can add sales tax on top. Every feature has a test mode, so a whole billing flow can be run with fake cards before any real money moves.
How I use it
- I built subscription billing for Rental Pilot tenants: Stripe Checkout for new subscriptions and the Billing Portal for everything after.
- Five webhook events drive the account state, and each one is signature-verified before it changes anything.
- A 30-day free trial still asks for the card up front, and plan changes prorate, with promo codes and optional Stripe Tax.
- A guard sends a tenant who already pays to the Billing Portal instead of opening a second subscription.
- I ran seven scenarios end to end in Stripe's test mode: trial, checkout, upgrade, declined card going past due, retry, cancel and re-subscribe. Live keys go in when the first paying tenant does.
Stripe is the right tool when the product is a subscription and the billing rules will change over time: trials, upgrades, promo codes, failed cards. I reach for it because the hosted Checkout and Billing Portal keep card data off my servers, and the webhook model lets my system react to billing events instead of guessing. I treat payments as the part of a build where mostly working is not a state.
Questions
Can Shawn Mervin build Stripe subscription billing into a SaaS product?
Yes. I built Rental Pilot's tenant billing on Stripe Checkout and the Billing Portal, with signature-verified webhooks, trials, proration and promo codes. It was tested end to end in Stripe's test mode across seven scenarios.
Does the card number ever touch your servers?
No. Checkout and the Billing Portal are hosted by Stripe, and the only thing that comes back to my system is a signed event. That keeps the compliance scope small.
How do you test a Stripe integration before going live?
I run every flow against Stripe's test environment first, including declined cards and retries, and check that each webhook returns 200. Live keys only go in once that run is clean.