How to get a phone alert when a Stripe payment fails

The events worth hearing about

Stripe sends hundreds of event types. A handful are money leaving or about to leave. These are the ones Acciti's Stripe connector knows, with the priority each arrives at. You choose which to turn on, and you can change any priority.

invoice.payment_failed is the one to start with. It fires each time a subscription invoice can't be charged, including each of Stripe's retries, so a customer whose card expired produces one event per attempt. Each attempt is another chance to get the card updated.

charge.dispute.created deserves the same priority. A dispute comes with a deadline for your evidence, and every day before you notice it is a day lost.

The quiet events are for people who like a note when money comes in. They arrive as a banner with no sound, so a good day doesn't sound like an outage.

Three ways to get them to your phone

An automation service

Zapier and IFTTT can watch Stripe and send a text or a push. Two costs come with that: the service now holds access to your Stripe account, and depending on the plan it may check for new events on a timer rather than as they happen.

Your own webhook endpoint

You can write an endpoint that receives Stripe's events and forwards them. Stripe signs every event with the endpoint's signing secret, and the endpoint has to check that signature, or anyone who finds the URL can send you a fake payment failure. Stripe's libraries do the check:

const event = stripe.webhooks.constructEvent(  rawBody,                           // the bytes, not parsed JSON  request.headers["stripe-signature"],  process.env.STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET,) if (event.type === "invoice.payment_failed") {  // forward it to your phone}

Then the endpoint needs hosting, logs and someone to notice when it is the thing that broke. That is a lot of software to own for one alert.

A connector

Acciti's Stripe connector is that endpoint, already written. It checks Stripe's signature on every event, turns the events you picked into notifications, and refuses anything that fails the check.

Setting up the connector

1. In Acciti, add a Stripe connector and copy its ingest URL.
2. In the Stripe Dashboard, open Developers, then Webhooks, and add an endpoint with that URL. Select the events from the table above.
3. Copy the endpoint's signing secret, which starts with whsec_, and paste it back into the connector.

Connectors are on the Solo plan and up. Compare plans

Test it before a real card fails

Add the same endpoint in Stripe's test mode, with its own signing secret on a second connector, and fire the event from the Stripe CLI:

stripe trigger invoice.payment_failed

The CLI creates the test objects that produce a real invoice.payment_failed in test mode, and Stripe delivers it to every test-mode endpoint listening for it. Your phone shows it:

Deciding what should wake you

A failed payment at 3 a.m. is rarely something you can fix at 3 a.m. High priority makes a sound and gets through Focus, but it doesn't repeat. Keep Emergency, which repeats until someone acknowledges it, for things that lose money every minute, such as checkout failing for everyone.

App Store renewals and refunds work the same way through App Store Server Notifications, and the connectors page lists every service Acciti verifies.