Payments and Monetization at Scale for Frontend Engineers

Payments are often introduced as a simple Stripe integration. In practice, even small products quickly run into complexity around pricing, subscriptions, failures, and global users. Frontend engineers are usually closest to checkout and monetization, yet rarely get a clear foundation for how payments actually work. This workshop is a practical introduction to payments and monetization from a frontend and full-stack perspective. Using React and Next.js, we’ll start with the core payment concepts every engineer should understand, then gradually build toward real-world scenarios. You’ll learn how a payment flows from user intent to settlement, how common payment methods differ, and how to structure checkout and subscription flows safely in modern web apps. We’ll use Stripe as a concrete example, but focus on patterns rather than vendor-specific APIs. Along the way, we’ll introduce merchant of record concepts, pricing and subscription basics, and what changes when you sell internationally. You’ll also see how to handle loading and error states, asynchronous confirmations, and post-deployment safety in a way that keeps both users and revenue protected. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have a clear mental model of payments, understand how monetization fits into your frontend architecture, and feel confident building and evolving checkout flows without treating payments as a black box.