I put off building checkout and payments for the premium version of poketto.me for way too long. The thought of integrating with Stripe — keeping “their” and “my” data in sync, handling callbacks, connecting the UI, smoothing out user flows… it always felt like too much to tackle on any given day.
But once I committed to a GA date for the premium version, I had to bite the bullet.
Turns out: integrating with Stripe is still no walk in the park. You need to dive into their API, understand their data model, figure out how it maps to your own business logic, and write code to keep everything in sync. (More on that in a future TIL!)
But the testing side? Surprisingly convenient!
Example: when a customer buys a subscription (via Stripe’s hosted checkout page), Stripe notifies me so I can mark them as a “premium customer.” In production, that happens via a webhook behind the scenes. But during development, I want to run my side of the transaction locally for debugging. Naturally, Stripe’s servers can’t just call my laptop directly.
Enter: Stripe CLI 🎉
Once installed and connected to your account, you can tell it to forward Stripe server-side callbacks to your local machine. That way you can test and debug the whole flow as if it were happening in production — but safely, on your laptop.