Payments, renewals and refunds

This page follows a purchase from the payment to the license, then covers what happens after it: renewals, refunds, disputes, and when the integration breaks.

Payments

The customer pays

The customer pays with a Stripe Checkout page, created by your website or by a Payment Link. Stripe collects their email, payment details and taxes, and sends them a receipt if you enabled it.

Stripe notifies LicenseManager

Stripe sends a checkout.session.completed event to the webhook. LicenseManager checks its signature, so nobody else can create licenses, stores it, and answers Stripe right away. The event is processed in the background, within seconds.

The Last event of the Stripe card is updated.

LicenseManager checks the checkout

The checkout is ignored, creating nothing, when:

• It isn’t a one-time payment, like a subscription or a setup checkout.
• It isn’t paid yet, which happens with delayed payment methods.
• None of its prices is mapped.
• It already created licenses.

The licenses are created

For each line item of a mapped price, LicenseManager creates as many licenses as the quantity, with the mapping’s policy, for the customer of the checkout’s email. See what a mapping creates.

The customer receives their keys

The customer receives one email with all their license keys, and their expiration dates. When sending fails, it’s retried, without creating the licenses again. You can send the keys again from the license page with Send key.

In a test product, the keys are only emailed when the checkout’s email is a member’s of your organization: see emails in test mode.

The customer

The customer is found by the checkout’s email, for the product: buying again with the same email adds licenses to the same customer, and an email you already know, like from a license you created manually, gets the new licenses too. The email is case-insensitive.

• Their name is set from the checkout’s, when they had none. A name you set is kept.
• Their Stripe customer is set when the checkout created or used one, linking to it in the Stripe dashboard. With a guest checkout, Stripe creates no customer, and it stays empty.

See how customers are created.

What’s recorded

Each license created by Stripe shows:

• Stripe payment: the payment it was bought with, linking to it in the Stripe dashboard.
• Price: what was paid for this license, after discounts and before taxes, in the checkout’s currency.
• Meta: stripe.checkoutSessionId and stripe.lineItemId, the checkout and line item it comes from. You can add your own fields next to them.

The events of these licenses show Stripe as who created them.

Delayed payment methods

Some payment methods, like bank transfers, SEPA Direct Debit or ACH, take days to confirm. Stripe completes the checkout before the payment succeeds, so:

1. On checkout.session.completed, the checkout is unpaid: nothing is created.
2. On checkout.session.async_payment_succeeded, days later, the licenses are created and emailed.
3. If the payment fails instead, nothing is ever created. Stripe tells the customer.

Free checkouts

A checkout with nothing to pay, for example with a 100% off coupon, creates licenses like a paid one, with a price of 0.

Duplicated events

Stripe can send the same event more than once, and sends two events for a delayed payment. A checkout creates its licenses only once, whatever the number of events.

When a payment creates nothing

The payment is marked as failed and the integration shows Error with the reason when:

• The checkout has no email. Stripe Checkout and Payment Links always collect one, so this only happens with unusual setups.
• The policy of the mapping was deleted while the payment was processed.

Create the licenses manually for this customer, then click Check now on the Stripe card to clear the error.

Renewals

Subscriptions aren’t supported: only one-time prices can be mapped, and there are no automatic renewals.

To sell licenses that expire, like a one-year license, map a one-time price to a policy with a duration. When it nears its end:

• The customer buys again, with the same email: they get a new license, with a new key, starting from the purchase date. The expired license isn’t extended, so they enter the new key in your app.
• Or you extend it manually: once they paid you, edit their license and push back its Expires date. Their key stays the same.

Refunds

When you refund a payment, fully or partially, LicenseManager isn’t notified, and its licenses keep working. It’s up to you to decide what the customer keeps:

1. In Stripe, open the payment and copy its id (pi_…), or find the licenses from the customer’s page in LicenseManager.
2. Open each license of the payment. Its Stripe payment shows the payment it was bought with.
3. Then either:
   • Expire it: click Edit and set its Expires date to today. The key stops validating, and the license stays in your history with its machines and events. This is what we recommend.
   • Delete it: removes the license and its history. A license used on active machines can’t be deleted: deactivate them, or expire it instead.

For a partial refund, like refunding 2 seats of 5, expire as many licenses as you refunded.

The license’s price isn’t changed by a refund: it’s what was paid, not what you kept. Your revenue stats count it until you delete the license.

Disputes

When a customer disputes a payment, Stripe emails you and shows it in the dashboard, but LicenseManager isn’t notified. Depending on the case:

• While the dispute is open, you can keep the licenses working, or expire them as for a refund and push back their expiration date if you win.
• If you lose the dispute, the money is returned to the customer: expire or delete the licenses as for a refund.
• If you win, there’s nothing to do, unless you expired them meanwhile.

When the integration breaks

When the API key is revoked, loses a permission, or the webhook is deleted, the integration is in Error or Disconnected and the owners and admins are emailed after the next daily check.

To recover:

1. Fix the integration: replace the API key or give back the missing permission, then click Check now.
2. In the Stripe dashboard, list the payments made since the integration broke, filtering on the date. The email tells you when the check failed, and the Last event of the card when Stripe last reached LicenseManager.
3. For each payment without a license, create the licenses manually for the customer’s email, with the policy of the mapping, and send them their keys.

When LicenseManager itself is briefly unreachable, nothing is lost: Stripe retries sending the events for up to three days.

Summary