Developer builds open source subscription backend after a costly billing failure

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After a misconfiguration left a customer's subscription status stale following a purchase, the developer set out to build more reliable infrastructure. The result is SubTru, a self-hostable, open source API that processes subscription events from Stripe, the Apple App Store, and Google Play. Apps can query its GET /access endpoint to check any user's subscription status. The article explains the difficulties involved, including duplicate, late, or out-of-order provider events and the need to verify each provider's differently structured payloads. The developer chose a single service design for receiving and processing events, weighing tradeoffs around failure isolation, scalability, and deployment simplicity.

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