Integrate with events

Set up an event destination to receive events from Stripe across multiple destination types, including webhook endpoints, and Amazon EventBridge. You can receive events in either:

• Self-contained snapshot events for a point-in-time view of your resources
• Lightweight thin events to guarantee you always act on the most up-to-date data, which help simplify your integration upgrade process

Use cases

When building Stripe integrations, you might want your applications to receive events in real-time from your Stripe accounts, enabling your backend systems to respond and perform actions accordingly.

With an event destination, Stripe pushes real-time event data from your account, enabling you to run backend actions, such as:

• Sending users a notification when a customer confirms a payment
• Initiating an internal claims reconciliation process when a customer disputes a charge
• Granting access to your user when they make successful recurring subscription payments

Supported destination types

Send events to an AWS account using Amazon EventBridge, or deliver them to an HTTPS endpoint through webhook endpoints.

Events overview

When an event occurs, Stripe generates a new Event object. A single API request could result in the creation of multiple events. For example, creating a new subscription for a customer might result in customer.subscription.created and payment_intent.succeeded events. For programmatic integrations, we recommend that you configure an event destination to receive these events as they happen. The way the event is structured and delivered to your destination depends on the format you choose to receive.

We provide two different formats of Event objects:

• Thin events: When delivered to your event destination, a thin event arrives as a lightweight event notification that only includes the ID of the affected objects. You can make a subsequent API call to fetch the complete Event object or the related resources’s latest state. These are generated by API v2 endpoints . See a full list of thin events.
• Snapshot events: When delivered to your destination, a snapshot event arrives as the complete Event object with an eventually-consistent snapshot of the resource that has changed. Because this data can be stale by the time you process it, we recommend fetching the latest version of the resource from the API. Unlike thin event notifications, the delivered snapshot events are versioned, which requires you to manage versions both on your Stripe event destination and your client. These events are only generated by API v1 endpoints. They include a previous_attributes property that indicates the change, if applicable. See a full list of snapshot events.

Choose a format

Use thin events when:

• Data integrity is critical, and your application must act on the most up-to-date information.
• You want to simplify versioning by managing upgrades only on the client-side.
• You’re building a modern, type-safe application and want to take advantage of SDK typing benefits.

Use snapshot events when:

• You need to audit the specific fields that have changed without making a subsequent API call.
• Your integration requires a point-in-time view of the resource definition and can tolerate working with eventually-consistent data.

This table outlines high-level differences across thin events and snapshot events.

Example thin event notification payload

The following is an example of an v1.billing.meter.error_report_triggered event. The data hash below won’t be accessible in the event notification sent to the destination. The related_object field includes the id of the object, but doesn’t include the object record itself.

{
  "id": "evt_test_65R9Ijk8dKEYZcXeRWn16R9A7j1FSQ3w3TGDPLLGSM4CW0",
  "object": "v2.core.event",
  "type": "v1.billing.meter.error_report_triggered",
  "livemode": false,
  "created": "2024-09-17T06:20:52.246Z",
  "related_object": {
    "id": "mtr_test_61R9IeP0SgKbYROOx41PEAQhH0qO23oW",
    "type": "billing.meter",
    "url": "/v1/billing/meters/mtr_test_61R9IeP0SgKbYROOx41PEAQhH0qO23oW"
  }
  "data": {
    "developer_message_summary": "There is 1 invalid event",
    "reason": {
      "error_count": 1,
      "error_types": [
        {
          "code": "meter_event_no_customer_defined",
          "error_count": 1,
          "sample_errors": [
            {
              "error_message": "Customer mapping key stripe_customer_id not found in payload.",
              "request": {
                "id": "",
                "idempotency_key": "37c741d8-1f7e-4adc-af16-afdca1d73b37"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    },
    "validation_end": "2024-08-28T20:54:10.000Z",
    "validation_start": "2024-08-28T20:54:00.000Z"
  }
}

Example snapshot event payload

View the following example of an setup_intent.created snapshot event, which includes the object definition as it was when the event was raised:

{
  "id": "evt_1NG8Du2eZvKYlo2CUI79vXWy",
  "object": "event",
  "api_version": "2019-02-19",
  "created": 1686089970,

Using thin events

Integrate with thin events by using the event notification sent to your destination to retrieve more details from the API.

Processing the event notification

The initial notification contains minimal data. Choose one of three approaches when processing the event notification, depending on what information your integration requires:

1. Retrieve the complete event: Use the fetchEvent() method to retrieve the complete Event object when you need more information than the related object’s latest state provides. The complete event object can include two types of additional data:
   • Contextual information about the event itself, available in the data hash. For example, a v1.billing.meter.error_report_triggered event includes details about the types and summary of validation errors in this field.
   • The previous values of any attributes that changed on the resource, available in the changes hash.

The following table details the additional data available in the complete event object compared to the initial notification:

1. Retrieve the latest state of the related object: Use the fetchRelatedObject() method to retrieve the latest version of the object associated with the event. For example, if you receive a v1.billing.meter.error_report_triggered event, fetchRelatedObject() retrieves the meter object that triggered an error report.
2. Process the notification immediately: If the event type and resource ID in the notification are sufficient for your use case, you can process it without making an additional API call.

The following example demonstrates how to retrieve the related object definition and additional event payload fields associated when processing a thin event notification:

com.stripe.model.ThinEvent thinEvent = client.parseThinEvent(payload, signatureHeader, endpointSecret);
com.stripe.model.v2.Event event = client.v2().core().events().retrieve(thinEvent.getId());
if (event instanceof V1BillingMeterErrorReportTriggeredEvent) {
  V1BillingMeterErrorReportTriggeredEvent postedEvent = (V1BillingMeterErrorReportTriggeredEvent) event;
  // On each type of event, the Stripe library provides a "fetchRelatedObject" method
  // that performs a network request to Stripe to fetch the latest version
  // of the object directly associated with the event, in this case, an
  // "Meter" object.
  Meter op = postedEvent.fetchRelatedObject();
}

SDK typing

Thin events and their notifications are fully typed in the SDKs.

• Event notification: The initial, lightweight payload delivered to your event destination is typed as {EventType}EventNotification.
• Event: After you retrieve the complete event from the API using fetchEvent(), the resulting object is typed as {EventType}Event.

Event permissions

To view an event in the Dashboard, assign the Admin or Developer role to your user account. To retrieve an event using the API, use either a secret API key, which allows you to view all event types by default, or a restricted API key with Read access enabled for the specific event type’s resource. For example, you can grant Read access to payment_intent resources on your restricted API key to programmatically retrieve payment_intent.succeeded events.

Event retention

In the Events tab in Workbench, you can access events within the last 13 months:

• For events less than 15 days old, you can view the full event payload, see the delivery attempts, and manually resend these events.
• For events 16-30 days old, you can access the full event payload, but you can’t resend them or view delivery attempts.
• For events older than 30 days, you can only see a summary view, which includes truncated fields of the original event data. Resending and viewing delivery attempts aren’t available for these events.

Use the Retrieve event and List events APIs to access events with their full payload from the past 30 days.

Event destination limits

You can register a maximum of 16 event destinations in each livemode or sandbox account. When registering a snapshot event destination with a version different from your merchant’s default version, you can register up to three uniquely versioned snapshot event destinations.

Manage an event destination

To create, delete, and update an event destination in the Dashboard, open the Webhooks tab in Workbench or use the event destinations API.

Disable an event destination

You can disable an event destination. After you disable it, Stripe stops sending any events to that destination. After you re-enable a destination, Stripe resumes sending events to it.