Stripe appears to be billing twice for each Subscription

Question

We are using Stripe subscription. In that if a user creates a Product then they can set the price suppose $9.99.

If the other users wants to subscribe the same product they have to pay $9.99. From the paid $9.99, the admin will get 2% and (2.9 + 0.30)% Stripe fee will be deducted and the remaining amount will be sent to the product creator's connect account.

The issue is if the user subscribe a product, a charge is created and the amount deducted from the subscriber. Then the invoice will generate and that time, again the amount will deduct from the subscriber a/c. Double time payment cuts from the subscriber's account.

I'm using destination-charges method to apply the charge and transfer the amount to creator's connect account for any subscription in the invoice.payment_succeeded webhook's method.

How to prevent 2nd time payment deduction?

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Answer 1

Creating a subscription will generate an invoice that will charge for the upcoming period(they are charged in advance, so if you had also done a destination charge before creating the subscription, you are charging the customer twice — I assume that's what you mean?

What you probably want to do here is one of :

• instead of doing a one-off destination charge or doing a transfer manually from a webhook handler, just set the application fee on the subscription so it's deducted from the invoice instead, by setting the destination of the funds and the application fee you keep :

  • https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/connect#transfer
  • https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions/create#create_subscription-application_fee_percent

• if for some reason that is not an option and you still need to do a separate charge than the first invoice, maybe create the subscription with trial_end set until the next billing date, which will skip the first payment (sine you already processed it)

  • https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions/create#create_subscription-trial_end