Stripe — Checkout, subscriptions, and webhooks that survive production

Wire an app to Stripe for one-time payments and subscriptions: a Checkout Session to take money, a signature-verified webhook to learn the outcome, and the billing portal so customers manage themselves. Targets stripe-node v22.x (API version 2026-05-27.dahlia).

The one rule everything else hangs off:

• Stripe is the source of truth; your DB is a cache kept current by verified webhooks. A subscription's real state lives in Stripe. You mirror it locally only so you can render a paywall without a round-trip. The webhook is what keeps the mirror honest — never the client redirect, never polling.

When to use / When NOT to use