About the Billing APIs
Understand how the Billing API objects work together.
Subscriptions automatically create Invoices and Payment Intents for you. They have the following parts:
- A Product to model what is being sold.
- A Price to determine the interval and amount to charge.
- A Customer to store the Payment Methods used to make each recurring payment.
API object definitions
| Resource | Definition |
|---|---|
| Product | What your business offers — whether that’s a good or a service. |
| Price | How much and how often to charge for products, including how much the product costs, what currency to use, and the interval if the price is for subscriptions. |
| Customer | Stripe Customer objects allow you to perform recurring charges for the same customer, and to track multiple charges. If you create subscriptions, the customer ID is passed to the subscription object. |
| PaymentMethod | Your customer’s payment instruments–how they pay for your service. For example, you may store a credit card on the customer object for recurring use. Typically used with the Payment Intents or Setup Intents APIs. |
| Subscription | The product details associated with the plan that your customer subscribes to, which allow you to charge the customer on a recurring basis. |
| Invoice | A statement of amounts owed by a customer. They track the status of payments from draft through paid or otherwise finalized. Subscriptions automatically generate invoices. You can also manually create one-off invoices. |
| PaymentIntent | A way to build dynamic payment flows. A Payment Intent tracks the lifecycle of a customer checkout flow and triggers additional authentication steps when required by regulatory mandates, custom Radar fraud rules, or redirect-based payment methods. Invoices create payment intents automatically. |