shut the api off 3 weeks ago and stripe still billed 41 accounts last night Shutdown Plan

Archiving a price stops new subscriptions being created against it. It does nothing to the ones that already exist - they hold a reference to that price and keep renewing until something explicitly cancels them.

Order I would do it in, today:

• page through stripe subscriptions list --status active --limit 100 and collect the ids
• subscription.cancel(id) on each, not cancel_at_period_end, since there is no product left to deliver
• refund the last invoice on each one, in full
• then email, after the refunds are in flight, so the email says "already refunded" instead of "will refund"

The six disputes are the expensive part. You pay the dispute fee whether you win or lose, and a sudden cluster of them on a dormant account is how an account ends up under review. Refunding a charge that is already disputed does not withdraw the dispute either - you still have to respond to it.

Cheap thing that would have caught it: run the cancel script against a copy in test mode, then require stripe subscriptions list --status active to return zero before you touch DNS. Money off, then product off, never the other way round.

I keep a shutdown checklist now and the first four lines are all billing.

Refund all 41 in full and do it before the statements land. It is $1,140. Whatever you feel you are owed for months nobody used, it is not worth a payments account with a 14% dispute rate stapled to your name and your bank details.

Then send two paragraphs. No apology theatre:

• the service ended on the 8th
• we have refunded your last payment, it will appear in 5-10 days
• here is your data

The people who were going to be annoyed will still be annoyed. They will just not be annoyed at their bank.

Do not cancel with proration. Stripe will happily generate a credit note and park the balance on the customer, which does absolutely nothing for someone who is never coming back. Cancel, then issue an explicit refund against the charge. Credit on a dead account is just a way of not giving people their money.

Fastest path is to delete the customer objects. Deleting a customer cancels all of their subscriptions in one call, so you get the cancellations for free and you are done in an afternoon.

Speaking as someone who has been on the receiving end: the thing that made me dispute rather than email was that there was no reply address. Whatever you send, send it from something a human reads for the next 60 days.