Stripe is an extremely famous payment processing platform used by various businesses all over the globe. The main goal of Stripe is to provide the opportunity for businesses to accept customer payments for products or services. There are also plenty of other advantages that Stripe can offer.

Stripe’s built-in fraud prevention mechanism helps companies detect potentially fraudulent transactions, protecting themselves from scams and other issues. Stripe also supports a wide selection of payment methods, be it debit cards, credit cards, Google Pay, Apple Pay, ACH (Automatic Clearing House) transfers, and many more.

This payment processing method can be used to simplify the process of sending payouts and even help manage subscriptions in the form of recurring payments. Stripe is easily integrated with many other business tools, be it CRM systems, accounting solutions, e-commerce software, etc.

Stripe was founded more than a decade ago, and it managed to gain massive popularity in a relatively short time span. Now it has millions of clients around the world, from smaller companies to large-scale tech giants such as Google and Amazon.

There are four main benefits that Stripe can offer to its customers – security, scalability, affordability, and ease of use. However, it is worth noting that setting up Stripe is considered simple only in the context of other existing payment processing systems. Setting up Stripe from scratch may be quite a challenge for some users, especially when there is a need to set up something complex, such as a recurring payment system for a subscription.

Stripe itself can offer extensive documentation when setting up various payment forms, but it is not easy to work with. For example, a subscription system created with Stripe uses seven different elements in its structure: Product, Price, Customer, PaymentMethod, Subscription, Invoice, and PaymentIntent.

The Product element is the fundamental explanation of a service that the business offers; it is the first element of the structure. The second element is the Price – the cost of a product or service the company offers, as well as the payment’s currency, payment intervals, etc. It is a logical continuation of the Product element in the subscription structure.

The third element here is the Customer – an element of Stripe API that helps identify customers who have chosen to subscribe to your service. It allows multiple recurring charges to be performed according to the rules established in the Price element. A customer’s PaymentMethod is the next logical step in this chain – explaining what the customer in question uses to pay for your services.

There is also an entirely separate element called Subscription, which combines details from both Product and Price elements in order to offer a detailed explanation of the subscription’s terms of service. Every single recurring subscription payment generates invoices from the Invoice element. This part details the payment status from the customer to the business. It is also possible to generate invoices manually, if necessary.

The last element in this chain is PaymentIntent – a combination of checks and triggers that are used to build the payment flow while also triggering additional authentication mechanisms when there is a need for them – the trigger in question can be one of the fraud detection mechanisms being triggered or any other sign of suspicious activity. Payment intent is generated automatically for every single invoice generated within the structure, similar to how invoices themselves work.

All of these elements are necessary for the subscription structure to be created with Stripe API – Product is combined with Price to create Subscription, which generates Invoice with PaymentIntent. Invoices are then given to the Customer, completing the chain. Every element of this chain requires at least some initial setup process, and it can be pretty daunting to get into.

Luckily, there are ways to simplify this process greatly, especially when considering the potential of no-code application development solutions. One example of such a solution is Lazy AI – an exceptional platform that relies on highly intelligent AI engine in order to provide the means of creating applications without any coding skills required.

Templates are essential for Lazy AI – it is how the solution itself works. Each template has a particular use case, and there are many templates to choose from already. Since Lazy AI itself is actively developing to this day, more templates and capabilities are sure to appear in the near future.

Going back to the topic of Stripe, Lazy AI also has a separate template that can be used to create subscription using Stripe API. This particular template uses FastAPI to set up its backend capabilities – a very popular Python framework that is often used to create effective APIs and integrations. The resulting app creates a Stripe subscription while creating logs of subscription statuses and various requests.

It is a great way to add subscription functionality to a service or application without delving deep into the code-heavy reality of the backend development process. Lazy AI’s template only needs the Stripe secret key to start functioning, and the app can easily integrate with other solutions or services – including payment methods, server links, frontend integration scripts, and more. Lazy AI is an excellent solution to various code-oriented problems that are not as simple as they might seem at first glance.