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Stripe Payment Failure Recovery

Detect and repair Stripe payments that succeeded but did not update your app.

Stripe confirmed the payment. Your app did not apply the result. That gap is where paid customers get stuck, support tickets pile up, and your team starts debugging at 11 PM.

The failure pattern

A Stripe event succeeds, but the expected app-side effect never completes.

  • invoice.paid fired — credits were not added to the account
  • checkout.session.completed fired — access was not unlocked
  • Subscription renewed — local plan state stayed stale
  • Seat quantity changed — workspace was not updated

These failures are invisible to Stripe. Stripe delivered the event and considers its job done. The gap is entirely on the app side.

Why this happens

Stripe recommends accepting webhook events quickly and processing the business effect asynchronously. That pattern is correct — but it means the actual fulfillment happens after your 200 response, outside Stripe’s visibility.

Common causes:

  • Queue workers are down when the job is picked up
  • App jobs fail after durable acceptance
  • Database writes break after the event is acknowledged
  • Webhooks arrive more than once and an idempotency bug prevents re-processing
  • Tenant or account records do not exist yet at fulfillment time

None of these show up as failures in Stripe’s delivery logs. Stripe sees a 200. Your customer sees a broken product.

The SendPromptly recovery workflow

SendPromptly instruments the gap between Stripe delivery and app-side fulfillment using two API calls in your existing webhook handler.

  1. Your app receives and verifies the Stripe event signature
  2. Your app durably accepts the work (enqueues job)
  3. Your app sends POST /v1/receipt to SendPromptly
  4. Your app attempts the business effect (credits, access, subscription state)
  5. Your app sends POST /v1/result with success or failure
  6. If the result is missing after the timeout (default 30 minutes) or reports failure, SendPromptly opens an incident
  7. Your team reviews the incident timeline in the console
  8. Your team clicks Reprocess — SendPromptly POSTs a signed callback to your repair endpoint
  9. Your repair endpoint runs your idempotent repair logic
  10. Your app sends a success result — incident resolves

The audit trail stays available after resolution.

Why this is different from webhook monitoring

Webhook monitoring tells you whether an event reached your endpoint. SendPromptly tracks whether the payment produced the app-side result the customer expected.

What it measuresStripe logsSendPromptly
Event reached your endpoint✓✓
Your app returned 200✓✓
Business effect was applied✗✓
Incident opened on failure✗✓
Safe replay with audit trail✗✓

What recovery should not require

  • Manual database edits under pressure
  • Guessing intent from Stripe logs
  • Searching queue failures across three systems
  • Re-running scripts you are not sure are safe to run twice
  • Asking the customer to wait while you investigate

What SendPromptly instruments at launch

Two Stripe event types cover the highest-risk post-payment paths:

  • checkout.session.completed — the most common cause of missing access after initial purchase
  • invoice.paid — the most common cause of missing credits and stale subscription state after renewal

No webhook proxy. No event routing. Two HTTP calls in your existing handler.

Get started

Start with the Stripe payment path that already generates the most support tickets. You can instrument one flow in an afternoon.