Ben Smith

Building a GitHub traffic dashboard with Stripe Projects revealed a surprising shift from “AI coding” into real infrastructure orchestration. In under an hour, Auth0, Supabase, Vercel, Prisma, deployments, environments, and scheduled jobs materialized around an idea with remarkable speed. The experience highlighted both the power and the emerging challenge of AI-assisted infrastructure: operational visibility, ownership clarity, environment management, and understanding rapidly orchestrated systems.

What it feels like building with Stripe Projects

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

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.

Check out the docs for the in-depth developer guidance.

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

Join a local Stripe Developer Meetup to learn about the latest features and network with your community.

Stripe provides the financial infrastructure businesses need to accept payments, manage subscriptions, send invoices, and move money. For many businesses, Stripe’s default behavior is exactly what they need - it works without any additional customization.

Sooner or later, you need something specific: a custom proration rule, a multi-step fraud response, data that doesn’t fit an existing Stripe object, or a purpose-built Dashboard view for your operations team.

Traditionally, that meant building around Stripe. A webhook sends an event to your server, your application runs some logic, and then calls the Stripe API. It’s a flexible pattern, but every customization adds more infrastructure, and more responsibility for availability, retries, state, secrets, security, and error handling.

[Stripe extensibility](https://docs.stripe.com/extensibility) lets you move more of that customization into Stripe. In this post, you’ll learn how to extend Stripe across three dimensions: logic, data, and user interface, using [scripts](https://docs.stripe.com/billing/scripts), [Workflows](https://docs.stripe.com/workflows), [Custom Objects](https://docs.stripe.com/custom-objects), and [UI extensions](https://docs.stripe.com/stripe-apps/build-ui), and see how they work together in a complete example.

Prefer to watch? See how these capabilities work together in our Stripe Sessions talk, [Extensibility with Scripts and Workflows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v5ik1t0azc).

## **Three dimensions of extensibility**

Most Stripe customizations fall into three dimensions:

* **Logic** defines what should happen when something occurs in your business.  
* **Data** represents the concepts and relationships that are unique to your business.  
* **User interface** gives your team the tools it needs to view that data and take action.

You can use each independently, but they become much more powerful when they work together. Your interface can display your custom data, your data can contain business-specific actions, and those actions can invoke your logic.

## **Logic: From default behavior to custom rules**

The best place to begin is usually Stripe’s default behavior. If the default meets your needs, there is nothing else to build or maintain. When you need something different, configuration gives you additional options supplied by Stripe or a partner. You can change how something behaves without writing the logic yourself.

Some rules, however, belong only to your business, and that is where custom logic fits. For example, when a customer changes plans midway through a billing period, Stripe can calculate the credit for the old plan and the charge for the new one down to the second - this is called proration. That works for most businesses. Yours might round to the nearest day, waive adjustments below $5, or use an entirely different calculation.

With a **script**, you can write that rule in TypeScript and deploy it to Stripe. When Stripe reaches the proration decision in its billing flow, it invokes your code, receives an answer, and continues processing. The code runs in a secure environment on Stripe, without requiring a server for you to manage. Scripts are for singular decisions: Stripe asks a question and your code returns an answer.

![Stripe Scripts](/images/what-if-stripe-could-work-the-way-your-business-does/image2.png)

More complex requirements need a different process. For example, when an early fraud warning arrives, you might need to check the charge amount, issue a refund when it falls below a threshold, and notify your risk team in Slack.

**Stripe Workflows** coordinates these steps in the correct order. Workflows can be triggered by a Stripe event, started by someone in the Dashboard, or called from your backend. It can combine Stripe API calls, third-party integrations, and custom actions without requiring you to build the surrounding orchestration infrastructure.

Scripts run code. Workflows coordinate work.

## **Data: Teach Stripe the language of your business**

Everything in Stripe is an object. Customers, Products, Payments, Invoices, and Subscriptions are all objects that represent the core concepts Stripe understands. But your business likely has other concepts that do not fit neatly into those objects. Imagine a vehicle rental company called Rocket Rides. A Driver maps naturally to a Stripe Customer, but the company also needs to represent Vehicles and Rentals.

A Vehicle has a make, model, year, and vehicle identification number. A Rental has a start date, status, assigned vehicle, and driver. These are structured entities with validation rules and relationships, not simply additional labels.

You could store some of this information in metadata, but metadata is not a complete data model. It does not provide typed fields, enforce a schema, or express relationships between objects.

**Custom objects** let you define these business-specific models inside Stripe. Rocket Rides can require every Vehicle to have a 17-character VIN and define a Rental that references both a Vehicle custom object and Stripe’s native Customer object.

In simplified TypeScript, that relationship looks like this:

```typescript
interface RentalFields {
  startsAt: Date
  status: 'upcoming' | 'in_progress' | 'completed'
  vehicle: Ref<Vehicle>
  driver: Ref<Customer>
}

@CustomObject
class Rental extends BaseObject<RentalFields> {}
```

Once deployed, Stripe provides APIs for creating, reading, updating, and deleting these objects. Your business-specific data now has structure, relationships, and the same platform foundation as native Stripe data.

![Custom objects](/images/what-if-stripe-could-work-the-way-your-business-does/image1.png)

## **User interface: Build where your team already works**

APIs give developers access to your custom data, but operations and finance teams should not need to query an endpoint to understand what is happening.

With **UI extensions**, you can create pages and side panels inside the Stripe Dashboard using Stripe’s design system. You choose where the experience appears and which information it presents.

For Rocket Rides, that could be a rental operations page containing the vehicle details, driver, payment history, rental status, and inspection information. Instead of switching between Stripe and a separate internal tool, the operations team gets a single view designed around the way it works. Viewing the data is only part of the job. When a vehicle is returned, the team also needs to end the rental.

![Custom UI](/images/what-if-stripe-could-work-the-way-your-business-does/image3.png)

## **Bringing logic, data, and UI together**

Rocket Rides can add an **End Rental** button to its custom Dashboard page. That button invokes an action defined on the Rental custom object.

When an operator selects it, the action updates the rental status, triggers the inspection workflow, and marks the vehicle as available again. The team remains in the Dashboard while custom logic runs against custom data and coordinates the next stage of the process.

This is where the three dimensions of extensibility become one connected system:

* Custom objects model Rentals and Vehicles.  
* A custom Dashboard page gives the operations team the right view.  
* An action provides a business-specific operation.  
* A workflow coordinates everything that must happen next.

The team clicks one button, but behind it Stripe is operating in the language of the business.

## **Start with what you need**

Extensibility does not mean every Stripe integration needs custom code. Start with the default. Use configuration when an existing option meets your requirements. Build custom logic, data, or interfaces when the requirement is genuinely unique to your business.

Scripts let you define individual decisions. Workflows coordinate processes over time. Custom objects represent the concepts that Stripe does not model natively. UI extensions give your team tailored pages, side panels, and actions inside the Dashboard.

Together, they let you extend Stripe without turning every customization into another standalone system your team must operate.

Stripe provides the foundation. Extensibility lets you build the business only you can build.

Start building with [Stripe extensibility](https://docs.stripe.com/extensibility).


Discover how Stripe Scripts, Workflows, Custom Objects, and UI extensions help businesses customize logic, data, and operations directly within Stripe.

What if Stripe could work the way your business does

About the author

Ben Smith