Wire up Stripe with Claude Code

The problem. You need to start charging customers, and integrating a payments provider correctly — not just quickly — is unfamiliar territory if you’ve never done it before.

The play. Claude Code can build the integration with you, but this is the one workflow on this site where “review every diff carefully” isn’t optional caution — it’s the actual job, because mistakes here touch real money.

Setup (15 min). Create a Stripe account if you don’t have one, and get your API keys from its dashboard. Keep the secret key out of any file Claude Code might suggest committing to version control — env vars only.

The prompt:

I want to add Stripe payments to [describe what you're charging for — a
subscription, a one-time purchase]. Walk me through this step by step,
explaining each piece before you write it, not all at once.

Specifically:
1. Show me where the API keys should live (env vars, never hardcoded or
   committed) and confirm my setup keeps them out of version control
2. Build the checkout flow using Stripe's own recommended integration
   pattern — don't invent a custom approach to handling card data directly
3. Add webhook handling for payment confirmation, and explain what each
   webhook event means
4. Tell me explicitly what you're not confident is production-ready and
   what I should test manually before taking real payments

What you get. A real, working payment flow — but more importantly, a session where you understand what was built well enough to be responsible for it, since you’re the one accountable when it touches customer money.

What to watch for.

• Never let a secret key end up in a file that gets committed to a public repo. Double-check this yourself; don’t just trust it was handled correctly.
• Test with Stripe’s test mode and test card numbers extensively before flipping to live keys. A payments bug is a much worse place to discover an error than almost anywhere else in your product.
• If anything about the flow feels unclear to you, that’s a signal to slow down and ask more questions — not to ship faster because Claude Code seems confident.

Make it repeatable. Once the core flow works, the same careful, step-by-step pattern applies to adding new plans, handling upgrades/downgrades, or adding invoicing — just don’t skip the “explain before you write” discipline once things are working, since payments code deserves that scrutiny every time, not just the first time.