[stevekemp]

Remember that if you use stripe subscriptions you absolutely must setup a webhook, or otherwise examine your logs every month.

Why? If a customer is subscribed to a "plan", and their payment fails it is retried three days later, then five days later, then eight days later, and if all three payments fail they're quietly unsubscribed without any notification being sent to you!

I have a toy project which has paying customers and last month realized I'd had people using my SaaS for over a year without having paid me. A few failures in a row meant they were unsubscribed, and since I didn't read the reports every month I didn't notice.

I reworked my payment system now, to subscribe to webhooks and ensure I find out promptly in the future.

Not a huge deal at my volume, but a surprise I could have lived without.

[loader]

Both webhooks and looking at your subscription settings are important. Here's some documentation on how to do both.

https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks

https://stripe.com/docs/subscriptions/lifecycle

The webhooks are important because stripe doesn't email you about failed payments you need to do that on your own.

And the default for a 3 time failed subscription over a 15 day period is to remove the subscription which you can easily change to keeping it but labeling it unpaid among other things.

[mperham]

Another pro-tip: you can install the Stripe iOS app and get realtime payment success/failure notifications. Not good if you have 10,000+ customers but useful if you have <1000 customers.

[Lazare]

Yes, my experience has been that for basically everything:

1. The Stripe webhooks are really great but...

2. ...you've absolutely got to pay attention to them like a hawk, because Stripe views that as the primary/best way of communicating critical details with you.

It's great when you get used to it/have built up support to handle their webhooks correctly, but it can be a bit confusing/daunting to start with.

[olegkikin]

Out of curiosity, did any of these customers return?

[stevekemp]

I had three users who were really affected, and all of them paid up. None of them "left" really, they were receiving a service from me, just not paying for it.

The user who had a years free service I wrote down a little - they should have paid around £140, and I suggested we'd be good if they paid £100.

Perhaps I went too easy on them, but I was trying to be nice and it wasn't their fault I'd not been paid, not directly. The other couple of users ranged from 2-8 months of non-payment, or so, and I agreed with each that I'd bill them the full amount as a one-off charge.