Payments and Billing: How Stripe Powers WarpDesk

Every card charge, subscription renewal, and refund on WarpDesk goes through Stripe. Here's the boring, reassuring version.

Why Stripe

Because payment processing is a specialty. Stripe is unusually good at it — PCI compliance, fraud detection, 3D Secure, dunning, receipts, tax handling. We'd never do it better ourselves.

What Stripe sees

Your card, your billing address, your email, and the products you buy. That's all. It never sees your vault contents.

The Customer Portal

The 'manage billing' link on the billing screen opens Stripe's hosted portal. Update card, download invoices, cancel — all in Stripe's UI. That means you never trust our billing UI to handle sensitive card data.

Webhooks and reconciliation

When Stripe events happen (subscription renewed, payment failed, refund issued), Stripe sends a signed webhook to our public endpoint. We verify the signature and update the credit ledger. No manual reconciliation needed.

Failed payments

Stripe handles dunning — the polite retry-and-email cycle when a card fails. If it ultimately fails, we downgrade you to free and keep your data intact.

Refunds

Any purchase can be refunded within 14 days via a support ticket. Auto-issued through Stripe; credits are clawed back from the ledger.

Currency and tax

Stripe handles multi-currency and tax rules automatically. You'll see the right currency for your region.

Fraud handling

Stripe Radar screens payments in real time. Genuinely suspicious cards get flagged before the charge completes.

A worked example

A family in Ontario subscribes to Family Yearly. Stripe charges CAD, adds the appropriate HST, emails the receipt, sets the renewal date, and our webhook credits their ledger — all before the page redirects.

Wrap it up

Payments are one of those places where boring is the goal. Stripe is very boring in the best way.