Stop Building Billing: Why Subscriptions Don't Belong in Your Core App

The Hidden Cost of Homegrown Billing

Every SaaS founder starts with the same thought: "Billing is just a few Stripe API calls. How hard can it be?"

Six months later, you're debugging proration edge cases at 2am, your subscription logic is scattered across three services, and your product roadmap is blocked by "billing refactor Q3."

Billing Is Not Your Product

Your users don't pay you because you handle subscriptions well. They pay you for the value your product creates. Every hour spent on billing infrastructure is an hour not spent on features that differentiate you.

The Creep Is Real

It starts simple:

Create a customer

Attach a payment method

Subscribe to a plan

Then reality hits:

Trials that convert automatically

Upgrades and downgrades with proration

Failed payments and retry logic

Cancellations at period end

Usage-based billing

Multiple currencies

Tax compliance

Before you know it, billing has become a product within your product.

The Solution: Separation of Concerns

The same principle that makes microservices work applies here. Your billing logic should live outside your core application, accessed through clean APIs.

This is why we built StackBE—to handle the complexity so you don't have to.

What You Get Back

**Faster shipping**: No billing code reviews blocking features

**Cleaner architecture**: Your app focuses on value creation

**Fewer bugs**: Battle-tested billing logic vs. your first attempt

**Better sleep**: Someone else handles the edge cases

Stop building billing. Start building your product.