Field notes
How Stripe behaves, and where it bites
Signed, retried, documented; and still able to go quiet without a single error. The essentials before you wire anything.
How Stripe sends
Stripe POSTs JSON events (invoice.payment_succeeded, charge.refunded, checkout.session.completed…) to endpoints you register, signs each request with Stripe-Signature, and expects a 2xx quickly. On failure it retries with backoff for up to 3 days in live mode, then that delivery is gone. Repeated failures can disable the endpoint entirely, and Stripe tells you by email, easy to miss in a busy inbox.
Where it bites
- Event payloads are frozen at your account's API version. Testing an old integration against current payloads, or vice versa, needs the actual historical bodies. If you didn't keep them, nobody did.
- The 3-day retry window is shorter than your incident. A bad deploy on Friday plus a long weekend can outlive Stripe's patience.
- Disabled endpoints fail silently forward. Everything after the disable simply never arrives, the classic absence failure.
The vault under it
Point a WebhookVault endpoint at Stripe (or fan Stripe's deliveries through it to your app with forwarding), and every event is stored in full for up to a year: signature headers verbatim, bodies byte-for-byte, searchable by the event type or, on Pro, by anything inside the payload. Replay any event to your endpoint after you fix the bug; bulk-replay the whole outage window through the rate-smoothed pipeline.
Create an endpoint
Name it stripe-production. Turn on forwarding to your app's handler if you want the relay pattern.
Register it with Stripe
Dashboard → Developers → Webhooks → add the capture URL. Send a test event; watch it land live in the explorer.
Keep everything
Every invoice.paid from here on is on the shelf, searchable, replayable, and ready for the Watchdog that notices the day it stops.
Verify signatures from the record
The vault stores Stripe-Signature with every event, so you can verify any historical delivery: HMAC-SHA256 your signing secret over "{timestamp}.{raw body}" and compare to v1. Preset verification with per-request verdicts: the Stripe preset gives every row its verdict.
{
"id": "evt_3RxKsNkdIwHu7ixC",
"type": "charge.refunded",
"data": { "object": {
"id": "ch_3RxKsN",
"amount_refunded": 2900,
"refunded": true
} }
}
Give Stripe a vault to land in.
Free tier keeps 3 days of events while you evaluate; Solo keeps a month from $5.