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by possiblelion 1493 days ago
Somewhat unrelated, but I've found it really difficult to stop a recurring payment with Stripe. A company which has shut (website down and email unresponsive) keeps trying to charge 299 bucks on my card via stripe. No way to stop it either, if the client website is down.

Ripe for failed founders to exploit
2 comments
edwinwee 1493 days ago
Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com? Would like to see what's going on here and stop the payments. (We stop recurring payments when a business shuts down their Stripe account.)
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sodality2 1493 days ago
What if a business does not shut down their Stripe account?

My business uses Payment links and a customer asked to cancel their subscription. Of course I canceled it but I stopped to think what would happen if I was hit by a bus. Is there no other option but a chargeback if a subscription does not have a cancel option?

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Jugurtha 1493 days ago
Hi, Edwin. I'm in the process of integrating Stripe to https://iko.ai. I recently discovered Portal (https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/integrating-cu...) and I thank you for that. Less code for me.

I'm a bit ashamed to say, but I'm having trouble with checking if the customer has a valid subscription. I'm currently only storing the customer_id in the database and retrieving the information from Stripe to have it as a single source of truth and avoiding putting the Stripe info in our database and having to make sure it's synced.

On the other hand, I can't make a request to Stripe with every request, so I'm thinking of memoization or something.

I could find guides on how to accept payments and create subscriptions which are trivial, but no examples on what happens after that.

Suppose I have an API with a single endpoint and set up a subscription for a customer, how do I not hit the Stripe API with every request to check if the subscription is still alive without storing customer info in my database and having to sync it (i.e: keep everything in Stripe)?

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edwinwee 1493 days ago
iko.ai looks neat! Our developers hang out in Discord (https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat) — this seems like a good question you can chat with them live about.
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Jugurtha 1493 days ago
That's great, I'll definitely /dev/pay* a visit.

Next question: Algeria is not covered by Stripe. Many people here incorporate in the U.K or the U.S. just to accept payments.

How can I put a country on the map here: https://stripe.com/global

What conditions that, if satisfied, would enable someone in Algeria to use Stripe directly? How can we make this happen?

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redshirtrob 1493 days ago
I had this happen with a fraudulent charge once. To be clear, I don't know that it was a recurring payment with Stripe, but the behavior was similar. It took me about three years and a half dozen new cards to finally kill it.

At one point I asked the customer rep if there was any way to rid myself of this nuisance other than completely closing my account. She responded with the normal "that's your decision, blah, blah, blah...", but I was legitimately asking, not threatening.

I think I said something like: "No, let me be clear: I don't want to close the account. I just don't want to deal with this every six months either. I'm seriously asking if this is the only other recourse because it seems we've tried everything else."

It did get resolved eventually. It was also for a trivial amount so nothing like what you're looking at. It was still very annoying though.

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