Adding Stripe Checkout to a Solo SaaS: Lessons from PatentLLM's $1K/mo Plan

PatentLLM started as a free patent search tool. Making it a paid product meant answering one question first: how do you handle payments when you're a solo developer who doesn't want to touch credit card numbers? The answer, of course, is Stripe Checkout. But the implementation details — graceful degradation for development, local caching to avoid API hammering, and the sales infrastructure around it — were more interesting than I expected. Why Stripe Checkout Instead of Stripe Elements Stripe offers two main integration paths: Stripe Elements gives you embeddable UI components. You get full control over the look and feel, but you're responsible for handling card data, SCA (Strong Customer Authentication), and error states. Stripe Checkout redirects users to a Stripe-hosted payment page. You lose design control but gain PCI compliance for free, automatic SCA handling, and support for dozens of payment methods without any additional code. For a solo developer targeting US patent law firm