Stripe for Indie Developers: Everything I Learned Across 6 Products

Stripe is the best payment processor for indie developers. It's also the one with the steepest learning curve for getting production-right the first time. Here's everything that took me multiple projects to learn, condensed into one guide. Start With Payment Links, Not the Full Integration If you're validating a product idea, don't build a full Stripe integration. Create a payment link in the Stripe Dashboard and use that URL as your buy button. Payment links handle: Checkout UI Card processing Email receipts Failed payment retries What they don't handle: automatic product delivery, subscription management, user account linking. For a first product, that's fine. Collect payments manually, deliver manually, validate demand. Then build the automation. The Webhook Pattern That Actually Works Every production Stripe integration lives or dies on webhooks. Here's the pattern: // src/app/api/webhooks/stripe/route.ts import { NextRequest, NextResponse } from "next/server" import Stripe from "s