Stripe setup and usage tracking

Getting paid is probably the most important part of your SaaS business. But building the system to actually handle payments can feel like a massive distraction from your core product. I think we've all been there. You start with what seems like a simple task, and suddenly you're neck-deep in pricing models, feature flagging, and compliance paperwork.

While a tool like Stripe is fantastic, a production-ready integration involves more than just a few API calls. It's about designing a system that can grow with you. Let's walk through how to think about it, from the first line of code to tracking complex usage.

Getting Started

The first step is always the easiest. You create a Stripe account, get your API keys, and you're ready to go. For a basic subscription model, Stripe has done a pretty good job of making this straightforward.

You'll start by modeling your business using Stripe's core concepts: Products and Prices. A "Product" is your service (e.g., "Pro Plan"), and a "Price" is how much and how often you charge for it (e.g., "$20/month"). This structure is clean and works well for simple, recurring plans.

For the quickest integration, I'd point you to Stripe Checkout. It's a prebuilt, hosted payment page. You redirect your users to it, Stripe handles the payment details and security, and then sends the user back to your site. This offloads a huge amount of work and complexity, especially around security.

When "Simple" gets hard

That basic setup works great until it doesn't. What happens when you want to introduce usage-based billing? Or maybe you need tiered pricing with different feature sets. Or you want to add a one-time setup fee. Suddenly, your simple integration gets complicated.

This is where the real engineering work begins. You need to build internal logic to:

• Track every customer's usage of a specific feature.

• Check if a user's plan gives them access to a certain feature.

• Report metered usage back to Stripe at the end of a billing cycle.

• Handle upgrades, downgrades, and prorations correctly.

Honestly, this can become a product in itself. We ran into this exact problem building our own SaaS tools and found we were spending more time on billing logic than on our actual product. That's why we built Autumn (useautumn.com). It's an open-source abstraction layer that sits between your app and Stripe to handle all this complexity. Instead of building a whole system, you just make a few API calls to us. An /attach call gets a checkout URL for any pricing model, /track sends usage events, and /check gates feature access.

Iterate Your Pricing Strategy for Early-Stage Founders

In the early stages, pricing should be as flexible as your product. Start with a simple model and refine it based on real customer feedback and metrics.

• Validate with Early Adopters: Conduct interviews and surveys to understand willingness to pay and feature preferences.

• Run Small Experiments: Test different price points or billing cycles with controlled cohorts and measure conversion and retention rates.

• Iterate Quickly: Use the data you collect to adjust your pricing tiers, add or remove features, and communicate changes transparently.

Creating a feedback loop around pricing helps you align your offering with customer needs and lays a strong foundation for sustainable growth.

Putting It All Together

Integrating payments is a journey. You can start simple with a basic Stripe Checkout, and that's totally fine. But it's smart to plan for the complexity you'll inevitably face with different pricing models and usage tracking.

Building a robust, secure, and compliant billing system is a serious engineering challenge. It can easily pull focus from what you should be doing: building a great product that people want to pay for. Using a tool that abstracts away that complexity, whether you build it yourself or use something like Autumn, lets you get back to work.

Getting payments right is tough, but it's a pretty good problem to have. It means you've built something people actually value.