Ben Smith

In complex, high-volume systems, even minor failures—like a dropped internet connection—can lead to major headaches, such as duplicate charges. This post explores advanced patterns for integrating Stripe into your enterprise applications with a focus on building fault-tolerant, user-friendly payment systems. Learn how strategies like idempotency and message queues can protect your users from double charges, reduce operational errors, and improve reliability as your system scales.

Because nobody likes being charged twice

Explore the critical importance of managing real-time inventory updates for both online marketplaces and physical stores. This blog post details the development of an event-driven architecture designed to synchronize inventory levels with Stripe payment events using AWS cloud services. The demonstration centers around the DevRel Swag Store, showcasing a practical application used at the GOTO Chicago event, which integrates serverless technologies like Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and IoT Core for efficient inventory management. Learn about the challenges of using Stripe metadata for inventory, and discover robust solutions for handling race conditions and implementing dynamic inventory checks. Additionally, understand the trade-offs between using Stripe Payment Links and custom payment processes for real-time stock validation.

How do I store inventory data in my Stripe application

Is your Stripe integration ready to scale with your application? In this blog post, explore smart data strategies to enhance performance and security. Learn how to leverage Stripe/'s features, secure web backends, and serverless functions for efficient data management. Discover when to integrate a global CDN and use a separate database for deeper data control, ensuring a seamless user experience.

Data access patterns for simple Stripe integrations

Event Destinations has begun rolling out to general availability as of 10/30 and will soon be enabled for all accounts. This post explores how to use Stripe Event Destinations and Amazon EventBridge to achieve near infinite customization possibilities for your payment solutions without disrupting your existing integrations.

Growing your Stripe integration With Event Destinations

Stripe Sandboxes offer a powerful solution for isolating testing environments, but how you implement them can make all the difference. Pick a sandbox strategy that best suits your organizations development approach and team size.

Choosing the right sandbox strategy for your organization

Secure your Stripe integrations by ditching unrestricted secret keys—learn how to protect merchant accounts with restricted access API keys and OAuth 2.0, and avoid compliance fees.

Upgrading your Stripe plugin security

Discover how to create independent testing environments with Stripe Sandboxes, streamline your development through GitHub automation, and prioritize the security of your API keys to enhance your payment integration process.

Avoiding test mode tangles with Stripe Sandboxes

This post demonstrates some more advanced patterns to help you build resilient and robust payment systems to integrate Stripe with your enterprise applications. As your integration grows in complexity and volume, these patterns become crucial for maintaining system stability and providing a smooth user experience.

Advanced error handling patterns for Stripe enterprise developers

With Workbench, developers now have a bird’s-eye view of their integration which shows many potential issues in one place. This makes it easier to see the impact of each incident, see how often it’s happening, and receive actionable advice for resolving the issue.

Simple error handling strategies with Stripe Workbench

This post shows how to use the Stripe Workbench Inspector to examine the lifecycle of a PaymentIntent object.

Bringing your Stripe objects to life with Workbench

Subscribe to Stripe Developers on YouTube.

Follow us at @Stripedev on twitter for updates and answers to your developer questions.

Sign up for the Developer Digest.

Join the Stripe Discord server to chat live with other developers.

Join Stripe Insiders to try the latest features and provide direct feedback to the teams that build them.

Today, Stripe introduces [Stripe Workflows](https://docs.stripe.com/workflows), a new way to orchestrate Stripe products and APIs with low latency and high throughput, making it easier to build responsive, end-to-end automation.

Stripe began as a payment processing platform that made it famously simple to start accepting payments with just “12 lines of code.” It took on the complexity of handling financial transactions so developers could easily integrate payments and focus on their core business logic. Over time, driven by customer demand, Stripe has evolved into a comprehensive suite of products that enables businesses to run their entire financial infrastructure on the platform. 

But with greater functionality comes increased complexity. Today, the challenge lies in coordinating multiple products seamlessly. Developers need a clear, streamlined way to build, track, visualize, and orchestrate automated workflows across Stripe’s ecosystem. Common use cases our customers have identified include reducing chargeback risk, automating billing, routing Invoices for internal review and flagging risky transactions. Now, this is possible with Stripe Workflows.

## What’s new?

Stripe Workflows introduces a new way to build and run automation workflows directly within the Stripe Dashboard. Instead of writing and maintaining custom code to handle events, orchestrate actions, or manage dependencies, developers can now create visual workflows that respond to Stripe events in real time. This makes it easier to automate tasks like sending notifications, updating subscriptions, flagging fraud, or routing invoices, without spinning up infrastructure or writing boilerplate code. With built-in support for branching logic, dynamic data, and over 600 event triggers, Stripe Workflows brings powerful orchestration to your fingertips.

## Getting started

Build and run Stripe Workflows directly from the Stripe Dashboard, with no need for additional infrastructure. To create and deploy a Stripe Workflow:

1. Navigate to the [Stripe Dashboard](https://dashboard.stripe.com) and choose the **menu icon** \> **More** \> [**Workflows**](https://dashboard.stripe.com/workflows).  
2. Choose **New Workflow** to begin building your first workflow.  
3. Choose **Add a trigger**, and from the suggested triggers, choose **Payment intent succeeded**.  
4. Choose **Add a step**, then from the following menu option choose **Add action**.  
5. Choose **Email a team member,** and from the *Find a team member* options select your own email address.  
6. In the body of the email enter “A new transaction has successfully been made”  
7. In the *Append data* section, Choose **\+ Add item,** then in the *My label* input enter *“Amount”.* Lastly, in the *Value* input box select the ***\+*** icon and choose **Amount**.   
8. Choose **Done**.

![](/images/introducing-stripe-workflows/image4.png) 

Provide a name for your workflow by choosing the “Untitled workflow” title at the top of the page and choose **Save changes** and **Activate**. This workflow is now ready to react to [**Payment intent succeeded**](https://docs.stripe.com/payments/payment-intents/) events.

## Monitoring, logging and tracing

Stripe Workflows gives you a single pane of glass to monitor every workflow execution in real time. Whether a run succeeds or fails, you can immediately see the outcome and pinpoint exactly which step caused an issue without sifting through logs across multiple systems or services.

Clicking into an individual run reveals a detailed execution path. Here, you can inspect the event payload that triggered the workflow, view the data as it passed into and out of each step, and trace the logic branch that was followed. This level of observability is often difficult to achieve when manually coordinating multiple API calls or services.

![](/images/introducing-stripe-workflows/image2.png)  
Logs are retained for 30 days by default, giving you ample time to debug failures, audit activity, or understand how your automation behaved in production.

## Error handling and resiliency

Things fail: services go down, connections drop, rate limits kick in, data gets missed, typos sneak in, it’s all part of building in the real world. Stripe Workflows is built with this reality in mind.

Every workflow comes with failure detection and retry mechanisms baked in. If a step fails, say due to a network blip or a service limit, Stripe Workflows automatically retries it with exponential backoff, all without you having to write a single line of error-handling code.

This kind of robustness normally requires setting up infrastructure, writing custom retry logic, and planning for edge cases. With Stripe Workflows, it’s built in. The product team designed this from day one to handle the undifferentiated heavy lifting, so you can focus on what makes your business unique. With these fundamentals taken care of, you’re free to build more confidently, and faster.

## Event filtering

Let’s take the earlier example a step further. One of the top requests from developers building advanced Stripe integrations is the ability to trigger automations only when certain conditions within an event payload are met. Traditionally, this requires setting up a webhook that fires for a broad event (like `paymentIntent.succeeded`) and then writing custom code to filter out irrelevant cases based on the payload.

With Stripe Workflows, you can filter events directly within the workflow trigger. That means the workflow only fires when both the event type and specific conditions in the payload are met, no need for boilerplate filtering logic or unnecessary invocations. It's efficient, cleaner, and reduces noise in your systems.

## Dynamic fields

Stripe workflows become even more powerful when they can respond dynamically to the data they receive. Dynamic fields allow you to access values from the triggering event, and from each step and use them to drive logic and actions within your workflow.

For example, you can branch based on whether an amount is greater than a threshold, whether a customer has a specific metadata tag, or if a product ID matches a certain SKU. Each branch can run a different set of actions, using the payload values in steps like email templates, API calls, or conditional checks, no extra parsing code required.

## Idempotency

[Nobody likes being charged twice](https://stripe.dev/blog/because-nobody-likes-being-charged-twice). In a system that moves money, you want to make absolutely sure that retrying a failed operation won’t accidentally charge or refund a customer more than once. Stripe has long supported this with [idempotency keys](https://docs.stripe.com/api/idempotent_requests) passed via headers and tracked manually by developers.

Now with Stripe Workflows, idempotency is built in. Each run of a workflow automatically carries an idempotency key, and each action respects it. This ensures that retrying an operation, whether due to failure, network issues, or human error, won’t lead to duplicated results. No need to generate UUIDs, persist keys, or manage retry logic on your own. Stripe handles it for you.

## Recursion guardrails

To help you build safely, Stripe has implemented recursion guardrails that prevent accidental infinite loops or runaway executions.

Let’s say Workflow A triggers an event that causes Workflow A to run again. That kind of cycle is allowed once, but if it happens again within the same chain, the system blocks it. This protects you from unintentional loops and unexpected costs.

Each workflow-triggered API call carries metadata in the `X-Request-Source` header, including:

* `config_id`: the ID of the workflow that triggered the request.  
* `run_id`: the specific execution instance of that workflow.

This metadata propagates through Stripe's systems and events, making it possible to track workflow lineage and detect recursive behavior. To prevent infinite loops, Stripe enforces a maximum recursion depth of 5, if a workflow emits an event that triggers another workflow more than five times in a single call chain, the system will automatically block further executions. This ensures your workflows remain safe, predictable, and cost-effective.

## Example workflows

Stripe Workflows is built to help teams automate the kinds of tasks that are often manual, time-consuming, and error-prone. Here are a few real-world examples of how you can put it to use.

### Reduce chargeback workflow!
![](/images/introducing-stripe-workflows/image1.png)  

One common use case is responding to early fraud warnings from [Stripe Radar](https://stripe.com/gb/radar). Let’s say you receive a signal that a payment might be fraudulent. Typically, this would trigger a manual investigation: someone would need to look into the transaction, determine whether the payment has already been captured, and then issue a refund to reduce the risk of a chargeback. 

With Stripe Workflows, this entire process can be automated. You can trigger a workflow when the fraud warning is received, check whether the payment has already been captured, and, if so, issue a refund instantly. The result is faster response times and fewer disputes, with no human intervention required.

### Compliance automation workflow

![](/images/introducing-stripe-workflows/image5.png)  

Another example is compliance automation. For businesses with regulatory or internal policies, certain transactions, such as payments over $5,000 from new customers, may need to be flagged for additional review. With Stripe Workflows, you can build logic that triggers on high-value transactions, checks the customer’s history, and routes the transaction for manual approval if it meets your criteria. It’s a simple way to add compliance guardrails without building a separate review system.

### Custom pricing automation workflow

![](/images/introducing-stripe-workflows/image3.png)  

Workflows also simplifies processes like setting up subscriptions for custom pricing. If your business offers bespoke plans or tailored quotes, manually creating Stripe products, prices, and subscriptions for each customer can be time-consuming and inconsistent. With Workflows, you can automate this flow: when a quote is finalized, the system can create all the necessary Stripe objects, customer, product, price, and generate an invoice-based subscription, all without any manual steps. This reduces operational overhead and helps your team scale more effectively.

These are just a few examples that show how Stripe Workflows is designed to meet developers where they are: solving real problems with automation that’s fast, reliable, and easy to build.

## Conclusion

Stripe Workflows gives you a powerful new way to build automation directly within the Stripe platform without managing infrastructure or writing boilerplate code. Whether you're reducing chargeback risk, automating compliance checks, or scaling custom subscription flows, Stripe Workflows helps you move faster and with greater confidence.

Most importantly, it's built with long-term extensibility in mind. As your business evolves, and as Stripe continues to expand its capabilities, Stripe Workflows will grow with you. The roadmap ahead includes even more advanced features, giving you the tools to keep your Stripe integration flexible, maintainable, and ahead of the curve. What will you automate first?

For more Stripe developer learning resources, subscribe to our [YouTube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/@StripeDev).


Today, Stripe launches Stripe Workflows, a powerful new way to automate your payment operations and orchestrate Stripe products with ease—right from the Dashboard. Whether you are looking to streamline invoicing, manage fraud detection, automate subscription logic, or build custom quote-to-cash flows, Stripe Workflows helps developers move faster with fewer lines of code. With built-in support for real-time triggers, conditional logic, and seamless integration across Stripe’s ecosystem, Workflows eliminates the need for managing infrastructure or writing boilerplate logic. Instead, you get a visual, event-driven automation engine designed for high-performance financial operations at scale. In this post, we’ll explore how Stripe Workflows can help you simplify complexity, boost developer productivity, and unlock new use cases—all with low latency and high reliability.

Introducing Stripe Workflows: Tailoring Payments to Your Business Needs

Ben Smith