Stripe operator

Answer quick Stripe questions with a compact reference for keys and their scope, CLI commands and webhook forwarding, customers, products and prices, Checkout sessions, subscriptions, payment intents and refunds, idempotency keys, expanding and listing objects, amounts in minor units, test cards, and common event types. Use when someone asks which Stripe API call, CLI command, or test card to use, or wants a fast lookup rather than a guided workflow.

Build Stripe Checkout sessions and handle their outcome, covering payment, subscription, and setup modes, server-side price lookup, attaching a customer and a client reference, success and cancel URLs, why fulfilment belongs in the webhook rather than the success page, trials and promotion codes, tax and address collection, expiry, and the billing portal as the management surface. Use when a purchase or signup flow must be built, when a user is charged but nothing was provisioned, or when the success page is doing work it should not.

Create, find, and reconcile Stripe customers against local user or tenant records, covering lookup by metadata rather than email, storing the customer id locally, avoiding duplicates on retry, payment methods and the default for invoices, tax identifiers and addresses, the billing portal, and deleting versus keeping a customer. Use when a customer must be created for a user or organization, when duplicate customers appear, when a subscription cannot find its customer, or when local records and Stripe disagree.

Confirm which Stripe account and mode an application is using, whether the key pair is consistent, whether any secret key is reachable from client code, the pinned API version, which webhook endpoints and enabled events exist, and the products and prices configured, without changing anything. Use before any Stripe operation, when a customer or price seems missing, when a webhook is not arriving, or when the user asks whether Stripe is set up.

Connect Stripe to the systems around it, covering the local billing mirror and how access is derived from it, linking customers to users or tenants and to an identity provider, entitlement checks in application code, the client library and Elements, tax and invoicing configuration, reconciliation jobs, revenue reporting exports, and pipeline test and deploy steps. Use when billing state must drive access, when Stripe must link to an identity provider or database, or when local records and Stripe disagree.

Take one-off payments and issue refunds, covering payment intents with idempotency keys, server-side amount calculation, automatic payment methods and authentication steps, confirming on the client, capture timing, reading the outcome from the webhook rather than the response, partial and full refunds, disputes and evidence, and reconciling amounts against local orders. Use when a one-off charge must be taken, when a payment needs confirming or capturing, when a refund must be issued, or when a charge and a local order disagree.

Model Stripe products and prices and change pricing safely, covering the immutability of a price, amounts in minor units and zero-decimal currencies, recurring intervals and trials, tiered and metered pricing, multiple currencies, lookup keys instead of hard-coded ids, deactivating rather than deleting, and grandfathering existing subscribers when a price changes. Use when a plan must be created, when an amount or currency must change, when a price id must be referenced from code, or when subscribers are on an outdated price.

Set up Stripe in an application from zero, covering test mode keys and their scope, the server client with a pinned API version, the CLI and local webhook forwarding, the webhook route left public and reading a raw body, a first product and price, idempotency conventions, and the checklist before going live. Use when an application has no Stripe wiring, when webhook forwarding must be set up locally, or when the user asks how to add Stripe.

Manage Stripe subscription lifecycles and mirror their state locally, covering statuses and what each means for access, creating with trials, upgrades and downgrades with proration behaviour, quantity changes, cancelling at period end versus immediately, pausing, dunning and past_due handling, reactivation, and reconciling the local mirror when events were missed. Use when a plan must change, when a cancellation must be scheduled, when access does not match what someone is paying for, or when a failed payment must be handled.

Diagnose Stripe failures from reproducible evidence, covering test and live mode confusion, mismatched key pairs, secret keys reachable from the browser, webhook signature failures and protected webhook routes, API version mismatches on an endpoint, duplicate charges from missing idempotency keys, duplicate customers, subscriptions billed for two items, access that does not match subscription status, amount and currency mismatches, and declines versus errors. Use when a payment, subscription, or webhook misbehaves, when a customer or price seems missing, or when local records and Stripe disagree.

Receive and handle Stripe webhook events safely, covering endpoint registration per mode, signature verification against the raw body, keeping the route public in middleware, the API version a payload carries, idempotency keyed on the event id, acknowledging before processing, out-of-order delivery and reading current state, retries and the retry window, local forwarding with the CLI, and replaying missed events. Use when billing state must follow Stripe, when events arrive but nothing happens, when verification fails, or when an event applied twice.