Two things Stripe was doing on its own, without us.
**A renewal produced no invoice and no mail.** InvoiceMail went out from
exactly one place — the first purchase — so a customer paying every month
for a year received one invoice, for month one. Stripe already says when
the money lands: invoice.paid with billing_reason subscription_cycle. What
was missing was the document.
A renewal has no Order behind it, and one was not invented for the
occasion: an Order is something a customer bought, and writing a purchase
nobody made would corrupt the record of what they have actually ordered.
IssueInvoice::forBilledPeriod() issues from the CONTRACT instead, at its
frozen net price, for the term Stripe billed. Idempotent against the Stripe
invoice id, which is unique in the database rather than checked in PHP —
and because the number is drawn inside the same transaction as the row, a
redelivery takes its number back with it and the series keeps its sequence.
Nothing in the paperwork can fail the webhook: issuing and mailing are both
caught and logged, exactly as confirmByMail() does.
Only a cycle renewal gets a document. The checkout's own invoice already
has one; an upgrade's proration was worked out against Stripe's boundaries
and would not match a document written from our snapshot; a charge raised
by hand is for something this catalogue cannot describe. All three stay in
the register, and are logged once as money no document of ours covers.
**After a plan change, Stripe went on billing the old price.** There was no
way to move a subscription onto another price at all, so a customer who
upgraded paid for the smaller package every month afterwards. The client
can now swap one, the item id it needs is learnt from Stripe's own events
(and asked for once, for contracts older than the column), and the
behaviour is chosen per direction: an upgrade settles immediately, so the
cycle invoice stays exactly the contract price the renewal document states;
a downgrade lands at the period boundary and settles nothing.
A granted contract has no Stripe subscription and is left untouched. A
change that reaches the machine and not Stripe is never rolled back — it is
parked on the contract with the error and the behaviour it needed, logged
as an error, and retried hourly by clupilot:sync-stripe-subscriptions.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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