How we made billing backendless

We think handling payments on the frontend is a better developer experience. Typically, billing is a backend job and requires webhooks, state syncing, then passing the data to the frontend. We wanted to offer a more "out-of-the-box" experience when handling things like payment links, paywalls and up/downgrade flows, and spent a bunch of time thinking about how we can perform sensitive operations without needing to perform the "round trip" to the backend. This is a short write up of our exploration around the problem and why we ultimately are giving up. Part 1: The Publishable Key When we launched, we had a secret key that could be used securely from the backend just as Stripe does. Many of our first users had actually never set up Stripe before, and immediately told us they wish they could just do it from the frontend. Our first solution was to create a "publishable key" which would let developers get payment links and check feature access (eg, does my user have any remaining ... Read full article.