What Is a Stripe Integration?
A Stripe integration connects your app to Stripe's payments infrastructure — enabling you to accept cards, manage subscriptions, and handle payouts without building payment processing from scratch.
Stripe is the default payments infrastructure for SaaS MVPs. A Stripe integration handles the payment flow between your app and your customers' banks.
What a Stripe integration covers:
- Checkout — hosted payment page for one-time or subscription
- Billing — subscription management, invoicing, proration
- Customer Portal — self-serve billing management for customers
- Webhooks — real-time payment events pushed to your backend
- Connect — marketplace payments with splits between parties
The webhook pattern: The most important part. Stripe sends events to your backend (payment succeeded, subscription cancelled, invoice paid) — your app listens and updates its database accordingly. Never rely only on the client redirect for confirmation.
Security rule: The Stripe secret key never touches the browser. All secret key operations happen server-side only.
How long does it take? Basic checkout (one-time payment): 1–2 days. Full subscription billing with customer portal and webhook handling: 3–5 days.