Architecting Bulletproof SaaS Billing with Stripe
Building a SaaS product is a marathon, but billing is where developers often trip over their own shoelaces. A buggy feature flag system costs you a weekend of debugging; a buggy billing system costs you revenue, triggers chargebacks, and destroys customer trust.
When you scale past a few hundred customers, the 'happy path' of Stripe integration falls apart. You encounter out-of-order webhooks, proration math that looks like witchcraft, and usage-based billing that accidentally double-charges users.
In this deep dive, we will architect a robust, production-grade billing system. We will cover asynchronous webhook processing, idempotent usage metering, and the dark arts of subscription proration.
The Architecture: Why Synchronous Webhooks Will Fail You
