Payments & Billing

This layer handles online checkout, recurring subscriptions, invoice delivery, and merchant compliance. The first decision is whether to act as your own merchant of record, or hand international tax calculation, compliance, and currency handling to a merchant-of-record platform. Direct gateways such as Stripe give you programmable building blocks for checkout, customer billing portals, and invoicing APIs, with deep control over the checkout flow. A frequent mistake is hardcoding subscription logic directly into application databases and skipping solid webhook handling for failed renewals, chargebacks, and expired payment methods. That causes silent revenue loss and broken customer access.