Engagements - A complete Stripe billing system: subscriptions, usage, dunning, webhooks
Stripe looks easy in the docs and turns into a liability in production. Dropped webhooks, double charges, customers stuck on the wrong plan, proration math that's just wrong, and revenue quietly leaking through failed payments nobody retries. A build treats billing as the system it actually is: designed once, correctly, with idempotency and edge cases handled — not bolted together one endpoint at a time until it breaks at 2am.
- SaaS with real revenue
- Usage-based products
- Fintech
What you'll have at launch
A billing system you trust: subscriptions, metered usage, proration, dunning, and webhooks that never drop or double-charge.
- Subscriptions, Checkout, and the customer billing portal wired end to end, with upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations handled cleanly.
- Idempotent webhook handlers that survive retries and out-of-order events, backed by an event log so nothing is dropped or processed twice.
- Metered and usage-based billing that invoices for what customers actually used, with proration that adds up.
- Dunning and failed-payment recovery, so you stop silently losing revenue every month.
How we build it
A build runs 4–7 weeks typical, shipped week by week in increments you review and merge.
Weeks 1–2 · Design & webhook backbone
We design the billing model against your plans and pricing, then build the webhook backbone first: signature verification, an idempotent event log, and retry-safe processing. Getting this foundation right is what separates billing that holds up from billing that double-charges.
Weeks 3–5 · Subscriptions, usage & proration
Checkout, the billing portal, plan changes, proration, and metered usage get built on top of the backbone, shipping in weekly increments you can test against Stripe's test mode. Every ugly state — mid-cycle upgrades, downgrades, cancellations — gets handled explicitly rather than left to chance.
Weeks 6–7 · Dunning, edge cases & launch QA
Failed-payment retries, dunning emails, and recovery flows go in; the tax and invoicing edges get closed; and we run a QA pass over the whole thing in test mode — reconciling events, simulating retries — before switching to live keys.
What's included
- Subscriptions, Checkout, and the customer billing portal, with plan upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations handled end to end.
- Idempotent webhook handlers with signature verification, an event log, and safe processing under retries and out-of-order delivery.
- Metered and usage-based billing: usage reporting, tiered pricing, and invoices that match real consumption.
- Proration and dunning done right, plus failed-payment retries and recovery emails to recover revenue you're currently losing.
- Stripe Tax and invoicing wired so the correct tax lands on every charge in every region you sell to.
- A reconciliation and event-log layer so you can always answer what Stripe did and why, when finance or a customer asks.
Stack
- Stripe
- Express
- PostgreSQL
- Next.js
How it runs on the subscription
Billing done right is a designed system, not a stack of quick tasks, so it runs as a build — the board dedicated to your billing, shipping the webhook backbone, subscriptions, and dunning in weekly increments. Same flat monthly subscription, from $6,900/month, most billing systems landing in four to seven weeks. You reprioritize which billing edge matters most as you go, and after launch the same setup handles the inevitable new plan or edge case one task at a time.
Frequently asked questions
- Can you fix a Stripe billing setup someone else broke?
- Yes — most billing work is inherited. Send the repo and the symptoms (double charges, stuck subscriptions, webhooks timing out), and the build starts by tracing and stabilising what's there, then rebuilds the parts that can't be trusted. It doesn't need to be clean first.
- Do you build usage-based and metered billing?
- Yes. Usage reporting, tiered and metered pricing, overage handling, and invoices that match what customers actually consumed are core to this build. Usage billing is where the proration and edge-case math gets hardest, which is exactly why it's worth building as a system rather than piecemeal.
- How do you make sure webhooks don't drop or double-process?
- The webhook backbone goes in first: signature verification, an idempotent event log keyed on Stripe's event IDs, and processing that's safe under retries and out-of-order delivery. That means a retried or duplicated event is recognised and ignored rather than charging someone twice.
- Do you touch our Stripe account or just the code?
- Just the code. The build ships the integration — Checkout, webhooks, billing logic, the portal, dunning — into your repo. Your Stripe account settings, payouts, and compliance decisions stay entirely yours; we build against them, we don't take them over.
- How long does a billing system build take?
- Most take four to seven weeks, depending on how many plans, how much usage-based logic, and how many tax and regional edges are in play. It runs on the flat monthly subscription — from $6,900/month — not a fixed project price, so you pay for the active weeks and can pause between phases.
Got a project? Let's ship it.
3 spots open. Subscribe today, hand off the first outcome, and we'll ship it in weekly increments. Smaller tasks still usually land in 48 to 72 hours. No call required.