The Unglamorous 80% of SaaS Billing
I spent the week wiring up Stripe webhooks for Broker Studio's free-trial flow. Here is the part nobody tells you about SaaS billing: half the work is what happens when a card fails.
The easy 20% and the unglamorous 80%
The checkout button is the easy part. The unglamorous majority is every branch where something does not go as planned — a card declines mid-trial, a payment retries, a subscription lapses and un-lapses, a webhook arrives twice or out of order.
Each branch needs handling, because each one is a real customer having a real moment with your product.
Boring on purpose
I tested all of it locally with the Stripe CLI before touching production. Not exciting work, but it is the difference between a trial flow that works in a demo and one that works when a broker in Red Deer signs up on a Tuesday night.
The free trial is coming soon. The billing will be boring — which is the point.
The takeaway: Reliable SaaS billing is mostly handling the failure branches; testing every card-decline and webhook edge case is what makes a trial flow trustworthy in production.