Stripe Is a Payment Gateway, Not Your Billing System

Stripe Is Incredible. It's Also Not Enough.

Let's be clear: Stripe is an amazing payment gateway. It handles cards, ACH, international payments, and fraud prevention beautifully.

But somewhere along the way, we confused "payment processing" with "billing system."

You start with Stripe Checkout. Simple. Clean. Then you need:

Customer management (Stripe Customers)

Subscription logic (Stripe Subscriptions)

Product catalog (Stripe Products)

Invoicing (Stripe Invoices)

Webhook handling (Stripe Events)

Customer portal (Stripe Billing Portal)

Before you know it, Stripe is your database.

Lock-in: Your entire billing model is now Stripe-specific. Want to add PayPal? Good luck.

Complexity: You're now managing Stripe state AND your app state. Which one is the source of truth?

Limitations: Stripe's model doesn't always match yours. Custom trial logic? Entitlements? Usage limits? You're on your own.

A real billing system treats payment gateways as interchangeable backends. You define:

Products and plans in YOUR system

Customer records in YOUR system

Subscription logic in YOUR system

The gateway just processes payments.

**Multi-gateway support**: Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net—same API

**Clean data ownership**: Your billing data isn't trapped in a third-party

**Flexibility**: Change gateways without rewriting your app

**True subscriptions**: With lifecycle states, entitlements, and access control

Stripe is great at what it does. Let it do that, and let a real billing system handle the rest.