Stripe consultant and developer for hire

What Stripe is good at

Stripe is a payments platform built for developers. A business can accept cards, wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, bank payments and other local methods through one account, and build everything around it with well-documented APIs. Card details are collected by Stripe’s hosted Checkout page or its embeddable Elements, so they never touch your servers, which keeps your PCI compliance burden much lighter.

Around payments, Stripe offers products for most money problems a growing business hits: Billing for subscriptions, usage-based pricing and invoices; Connect for platforms and marketplaces that pay out to other people; Radar for fraud screening; Tax for sales tax calculation; and Terminal for in-person card readers. Webhooks tell your app when something happens, such as a payment succeeding, a card failing or a subscription renewing.

When Stripe is the right choice, and when it is not

• Great fit: SaaS products, membership sites, booking apps and marketplaces where payments are part of the software itself.
• Great fit: businesses that need flexible pricing, such as trials, seats, usage, add-ons, coupons or prorations.
• Less ideal: a retail shop mostly taking in-person payments. Square, Clover or Toast may fit better with their point-of-sale hardware and apps.
• Less ideal: very simple invoicing for a few clients a month. Your accounting software’s built-in payments may be enough.
• Watch out for: some industries are restricted or need extra review. Check Stripe’s restricted business list before you build.
• Alternatives worth knowing: PayPal and Braintree, Adyen for larger volumes, and Square for in-person sellers. Each has different strengths in fees, payment methods and hardware.

What we build with Stripe

• Checkout flows for web and mobile apps, using Stripe Checkout, Payment Links or Elements, with saved payment methods for repeat customers.
• Subscription billing with Stripe Billing: plans, trials, upgrades and downgrades, metered usage, dunning for failed payments, and the Stripe customer portal or your own billing screens.
• Stripe Connect platforms: onboarding sellers or service providers, splitting payments, holding funds, platform fees and payouts.
• Deposits, balances and payment plans for service businesses, such as booking deposits or project milestones.
• Webhook handling that is reliable: verified signatures, retries handled safely, and no double-charging or missed updates.
• Syncing Stripe payments, fees and refunds into QuickBooks, Xero or your own reports.
• Fixing broken integrations: failed webhooks, subscriptions out of sync with your app, and old charge code moved to current payment flows.

Stripe consultant, freelancer or development company

• Freelance Stripe developer: good for adding a checkout to an existing app. Billing logic and Connect have many edge cases, so check they have handled refunds, disputes and failed payments before.
• No-code plugins: fine for simple one-time payments on a website. They rarely handle custom pricing, marketplaces or syncing payment status back into your own data.
• In-house developer: makes sense when payments are the core of your product. It is a full salary, and payments work comes in bursts.
• Zoti’s monthly team: a project manager plus developers who build Stripe into the full app around it, from the database to the screens, on a plan from $499/month that includes hosting and ongoing changes.

How a Stripe project works

1. Map the money flowWe write down who pays, when, how much, who gets paid out, and what happens on refunds, failures and cancellations.
2. Pick the Stripe productsWe choose between Checkout, Elements, Billing, Invoicing and Connect based on that map, not on habit.
3. Design the screensYou see clickable designs of checkout, billing and account pages before code is written.
4. Build in test modeEverything is built and tested in Stripe test mode, including failed cards, disputes and webhook retries.
5. Go live and monitorWe switch to live keys, watch the first payments closely, and handle changes to pricing and billing on your plan.