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You're right, their documentation is great and the API is nice to work with, but you are forced to do things their way. I was recently working with Billing and

You're right, their documentation is great and the API is nice to work with, but you are forced to do things their way. I was recently working with Billing and ran into a pretty big issue: A customer on a recurring plan upgrades to a more expensive plan. As long as the customer has a valid source on file, the upgrade is processed. Stripe's default is to adjust the payment to be collected and charge it on the next invoice, which comes at the end of the billing period. If you want to charge the difference immediately, you can by manually forcing an invoice. The problem is that the invoice doesn't close for 24 hours and you can't force it to close any faster. If the customer's payment source is declined when the invoice closes, you just gave them 24 hours access to your premium upgrade which you now have to detect and rescind after being alerted via a webhook. There's nothing in the documentation that warns about this or offers a solution, and worse yet, rolling the user back to their previous plan is not an option. For some use cases, it might not be a big deal, but for most businesses that is a nightmare. The easy stuff is indeed easy, but once you start to wander off of The Path, things can get very difficult.

mahmoudimus 8y ago
Why can't you just charge the card directly?
- chrsstrm 8y ago
  That defeats the entire purpose of using the Billing product. Best I could come up with is to auth the source for the amount and see if it is accepted, then let it die by not capturing. But then you have customers who complain about being double charged.
kwindla 8y ago
Our experience is that manual invoices are charged right away. I wonder what's different about our setups? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is webhooks that aren't responding, which would delay the invoice closing. But I think that would make the delay 72 hours, rather than 24.
- chrsstrm 8y ago
  I misspoke, it's 1 hour, not 24. Can be found here [0]. Regardless, the upgrade happens _before_ the customer is charged, so unless you put a hold on your system and wait for that invoice to close, you're still giving them access before they've paid (Stripe's system will shown them as having the new upgraded plan before the invoice closes). And with the charge re-tries and back-off they use, if your webhooks aren't listening and reacting, you've still opened up your product to a user who hasn't paid for up to days at a time. I would be very interested to know how you got yours to close instantly, if it is doing that. [0] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/subscription#generating-invoices https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/subscription#genera...
  - kwindla 8y ago
    You're right, it's not synchronous! I looked back at our development notes and it seems like we were seeing about 15 minutes, generally, between creation of the manual invoice and finalization/payment. But that was using our test, not production Stripe API keys, and was a fairly small set of anecdata. I don't have better data because we ended up not rolling out any features that required manual invoice generation.
  - athrun 8y ago
    If you want to skip the 1 hour delay, you can manually finalize the invoice: https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/finalize https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/finalize

mahmoudimus 8y ago

Why can't you just charge the card directly?

chrsstrm 8y ago
That defeats the entire purpose of using the Billing product. Best I could come up with is to auth the source for the amount and see if it is accepted, then let it die by not capturing. But then you have customers who complain about being double charged.

kwindla 8y ago

Our experience is that manual invoices are charged right away. I wonder what's different about our setups? The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is webhooks that aren't responding, which would delay the invoice closing. But I think that would make the delay 72 hours, rather than 24.

chrsstrm 8y ago
I misspoke, it's 1 hour, not 24. Can be found here [0]. Regardless, the upgrade happens _before_ the customer is charged, so unless you put a hold on your system and wait for that invoice to close, you're still giving them access before they've paid (Stripe's system will shown them as having the new upgraded plan before the invoice closes). And with the charge re-tries and back-off they use, if your webhooks aren't listening and reacting, you've still opened up your product to a user who hasn't paid for up to days at a time. I would be very interested to know how you got yours to close instantly, if it is doing that. [0] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/subscription#generating-invoices https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/subscription#genera...
- kwindla 8y ago
  You're right, it's not synchronous! I looked back at our development notes and it seems like we were seeing about 15 minutes, generally, between creation of the manual invoice and finalization/payment. But that was using our test, not production Stripe API keys, and was a fairly small set of anecdata. I don't have better data because we ended up not rolling out any features that required manual invoice generation.
- athrun 8y ago
  If you want to skip the 1 hour delay, you can manually finalize the invoice: https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/finalize https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/finalize