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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T13:48:58+00:00

Rails newb here, so add as much detail to the answer as you would

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Rails newb here, so add as much detail to the answer as you would like and feel free to tell me I’m doing it wrong.

Context: I’m building a SaaS rails app and plan to add stripe (payment) integration soon. I would like to build out the functionality that differentiates the various account types (subscription plans) before I integrate stripe.

I’m using many if / else statements through out the app depending on account type (e.g., free, level 1, level 2) to show / hide appropriate functionality to the user. My basic statements look like this:

<% if current_user.account_level == "1" %>
    your account level is 1
<% elsif current_user.account_level == "2" %>
    your account level is 2
<% else %>

<% end %>

This assumes I’m keeping record of what “account level” the user has in the user model (or some other model). Is this the appropriate place to do so? Technically, Stripe has the most current data (i.e. if the card canceled the account level would be different). Should I be using the Stripe api directly to determine account level? It seems like I should have record of that somewhere in my data.

Are there any other best practices I should keep in mind while developing knowing that I’ll be integrating Stripe in the future?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    While you’re right that Stripe will store the latest data, I would recommend maintaining a local cache of anything you’ll use frequently (like the subscription state).

    There are two main approaches you might use to make sure your database has the latest state:

    • In your code that makes API calls to Stripe, be sure you’re also updating your local copy, or

    • Use our webhooks to listen for events related to your customers (e.g., customer.subscription.updated). By doing this, you can be sure your local database always matches up with Stripe – even if you change your customer’s plan via the dashboard, your webhook endpoint will receive the update.

    The primary benefit to storing this data locally is speed: you most likely don’t want your customers waiting on an API call for each request that accesses this data, especially since it seems that you need it throughout your website.

    You will want to make sure you’re storing the customer ID in your database so that you can match up the Stripe customer with your local user.

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