I have a Stripe product that has an auto-translation feature based on the number of characters.
When the user subscription is created, automatically the user will have an attribute called translated_characters that will be incremented based on the number of characters he translated and it has a limit which will be based on a metadata in the Stripe product, which is received through customer.subscription.created event.
What I want to do is to do is to reset the user attribute customer.subscription.created each month to 0 based on his subscription. So if a user has a yearly subscription, and he is billed each month, would that send the webhook event customer.subscription.updated to my backend service in order to reset translated_characters to 0 on each month?
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I'm new to stripe webhooks. My application runs with user subsctipns. I got the user successfully use strie to activate their subscription plan monthly. now all i want is when ever stripe chargers the user with a monthly subscription, I want to update my database with the next payment date.
Ex: If user was charged on 27th July and the next payment date would be 27th Aug, I want to update my database with the customer's next payment date and send the user the notification regarding the same, as. you have been charged by your monthly subscription o plan(on 27th July) and your next payment date would next month(27 Aug).
I have an idea of how can i send user notifications but the problem I'm facing is the stripe is not updated by the database. I have used webhooks to get the notifications and update method but am unable to do so.
If anyone could guide me with this,
Thanks
To be notified when customers pay an invoice, you can listen to the webhook event invoice.payment_succeeded. In the payload you will get an invoice object, which has a subscription property.
If you retrieve that subscription, then you can find the current_period_end property to know when the next invoice will be created.
Say I am letting customers subscribe to a service, as I see it there are 2 events that I need to know about :
The current charge succeeded or failed, so I can congratulate him for joining in.
every next charge (every month) succeeded or failed.
Stripe have too many events, and it's hard to know which one of them to listen to :
invoice.paid - "Occurs whenever an invoice payment attempt succeeds"
charge.succeeded - "occures when a new charge was created" (so what's the difference??)
invoice.payment_succeeded - "Occurs whenever an invoice payment attempt succeeds."
customer.subscription.created - "Occurs whenever a customer is signed up for a new plan."
Now I am aware that a few events can happen for a single API call, but,
What should a developer listen to in order to know that his user successfully subscribed, or failed ? how invoice.paid is different than charge.succeeded ? and how invoice.payment_succeeded is different from those ?
It is too messy, I just need to get a yes or no.
I read the API https://stripe.com/docs/api/events/types
It comes down to what you want to listen for.
charge.succeeded will trigger when an invoice is successfully paid, but it'll also trigger for one-off payments.
invoice.paid will trigger when an invoice is paid but will also trigger if you mark the invoice as paid out of band (e.g. someone pays you in cash)
invoice.payment_succeeded is the same as invoice.paid, but won't trigger if you mark the invoice as paid out of band. If you don't anticipate ever accepting out of band payments, then consider using this event.
customer.subscription.created will trigger when a new subscription is created, which isn't the same as the first invoice being paid (e.g. you can create a subscription with a trial period that won't trigger an invoice paid event immediately).
If your business only works with subscriptions (and not one-off payments) and you don't particularly care about the invoice data, use charge.succeeded. If you use both then it's useful to listen to both events to distinguish between the two.
In your case, you probably only want to listen to invoice.payment_succeeded. When you get the invoice, look at the billing_reason field: https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/object#invoice_object-billing_reason
If it's set to subscription_create, then send your congratulatory email. If it's subscription_cycle, then it's because the subscription entered a new billing cycle and the payment succeeded.
I am using stripe for a subscription based project and recently found out that you can subscribe without the user requiring payment information with a trial period.
How does stripe handle the user once the trial period ends but didn't any payment information?
When I look at customers it says that there isn't any default source.
At the end of the trial period, the Subscription would renew its billing cycle. This would make the Subscription move to status: "active" and send customer.subscription.updated. A new Invoice would also be created. This would send the invoice.created event.
An hour or two later, the Invoice would be automatically finalized and Stripe would attempt to pay it. The payment would fail since the Customer has no payment method attached. This would send an invoice.payment_failed event. The Invoice would be retried multiple times as documented here. Stripe can even send emails to your Customer asking them to add/update their card.
If all payment retries fail, the Subscription would then be canceled automatically.
What event should my webhook look for in order to update a customer's subscription in my database? I would assume customer.subscription.updated as it contains the current_period_start and current_period_end items. However, my concern is that customer.subscription.updated is apparently fired an hour or so before invoice.payment_succeeded is fired. I wouldn't want to update a customer's subscription if the payment then failed an hour later.
As duck stated in his/her comment, I think the best way to update a subscription if the payment of the invoice failed or succeeded is to listen to these events:
invoice.payment_succeeded: Occurs whenever an invoice payment attempt succeeds.
invoice.payment_failed: Occurs whenever an invoice payment attempt fails, due either to a declined payment or to the lack of a stored payment method.
Actually this is the way I handle things in production, and it is very effective. I would recommend the Stripe documentation's article Billing Lifecycle and Events, especially the section The subscription lifecycle:
After this first invoice, the following cycle of events repeats every
billing period:
When the subscription approaches its renewal date, an invoice.upcoming event is sent.
When the subscription period elapses, an invoice.created event is sent, indicating the creation of a draft invoice.
About an hour after the invoice is created, it is finalized (changes are no longer permitted), and an invoice.finalized event is
sent. A charge is attempted, and a charge.succeeded event is sent to
indicate that the payment was successful.
An invoice.payment_succeeded event is sent to indicate that the invoice was marked paid.
I have a subscription plan on stripe, and use this for per seat pricing.
The specific use case is:
Customer has previously paid and so has customer id and subscription id in the database
They remove all of their users one month
The next month they add a user again
I want the end date to have been updated to the end of the current month when the bill period rolls over, so that I don't display a message saying they didn't pay for previous bill period.
In the stripe subscription object, can I set the quantity for the subscription to 0, meaning the customer won't get billed?
If I do this, will the webhook for invoice.payment_succeeded still be called? This allows me to update information in the database.
Is there a different webhook I should be using for this?
Yes if you will set quantity of subscription to 0 then still a zero dollar invoice still come in payment_succeeded webhook and will update the invoice.