Stripe Kit

Honestly? Frustration. I was building my fifth SaaS project and found myself copy-pasting the same Stripe integration code yet again — webhook handlers, subscription logic, checkout flows. The official Stripe SDK is powerful but low-level. Every project needed the same 500 lines of boilerplate before I could even start on the actual product. I kept thinking "someone must have solved this" but existing solutions were either too basic (just thin wrappers) or way too opinionated. I wanted something in the middle — complete enough to handle real production needs, simple enough that I wouldn't need to read docs for an hour. Three things drove me crazy: First, webhooks. Stripe has 150+ event types and if you typo an event name, it fails silently. I wanted TypeScript to yell at me before production does. Second, the repetition. Every project needs customer portal setup, subscription pause/resume logic, proper error handling. Why am I writing this for the tenth time? Third, framework differences. Next.js App Router handles raw bodies differently than Pages Router, which is different from Express. I wanted one API that just works everywhere. Started small — just typed webhook handlers. That alone saved hours of debugging. Then I kept scratching my own itches: added subscription management, then checkout helpers, then framework adapters. The biggest shift was realizing I shouldn't hide Stripe — I should complement it. So there's always an escape hatch to the raw Stripe instance when you need it. The goal became: make the common case a one-liner, but never trap advanced users. Four weeks later: 6 npm packages, a CLI scaffolder, and I'm actually using it in production. Now I want to see what problems other developers hit — that'll shape what comes next.