Stripe Checkout - Subscription Issue with Recognized Stripe User

Question

I have Stripe working great. Upon a customer's donation, a new Subscription is created, and it works great - except if Stripe recognizes the email and says, "Enter the verification code."

If the customer does that, for some reason, a new subscription is not created and the customer is not charged.

Here is my charge-monthly.php

<?php

require_once('init.php');
// Set your secret key: remember to change this to your live secret key in production
// See your keys here https://dashboard.stripe.com/account/apikeys
\Stripe\Stripe::setApiKey("sk_test_**************");

// Get the credit card details submitted by the form
$token = $_POST['stripeToken'];
$email = $_POST['stripeEmail'];
$amount = $_POST['amount'];
$finalamount = $amount * 100;
$dollars = ".00";
$plan = "/month"; 
$dash = " - "; 
$monthlyplan = $amount .$dollars .$plan .$dash .$email; 


//Create monthly plan
$plan = \Stripe\Plan::create(array(
  "name" => $monthlyplan,
  "id" => $monthlyplan,
  "interval" => "month",
  "currency" => "usd",
  "amount" => $finalamount,
));


// Create a Customer
$customer = \Stripe\Customer::create(array(
  "source" => $token,
  "description" => "MONTHLY DONATION",
    "plan" => $monthlyplan, 
  "email" => $email, )
);


?>

Any ideas why when Stripe recognizes the user and he is "logged in" it does not allow me to create a subscription?

In the Stripe log, I receive this 400 error:

{
   "error": {
   "type": "invalid_request_error",
   "message": "Plan already exists."
   }
 }

But there definitely isn't a plan created... ah!

I am not sure what is happening! You have said that you faced issue creating Subscription. But provided code is for creating Plan and Customer. And the error message said "Plan already exists" though the ID of the Plan is matched with existing Plan as per message! — Zico

duck duck · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-10T18:13:29

The reason your request is failing is because if a user comes back with the same email address and wants to sign up for the same plan, you already have an existing plan with that name,

$monthlyplan = $amount .$dollars .$plan .$dash .$email;

so your call to \Stripe\Plan::create will return an error and cause the rest of your calls to fail here.

You could add something like a unique id or time to your plan id.

http://php.net/manual/en/function.time.php http://php.net/manual/en/function.uniqid.php

Some other ways that folks typically handle this are:

Create a single plan for $1, and then adjust the quantity when creating your subscription. So a monthly plan for $1 with quantity of 100, would charge $100 month.
Store the amount that a customer will pay within your application. Subscribe your customers to a $0/month plan. Use webhooks to listen for invoice.created events. Have your webhook handler add an Invoice Item every month for the balance.

Stripe Checkout - Subscription Issue with Recognized Stripe User

1 Answers