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Blog post from Stripe
Stripe Billing introduces the innovative feature of test clocks, allowing businesses to simulate time progression in billing scenarios without waiting for real-world time to pass, thus enabling more efficient and error-free testing of recurring payments and other billing features. Recognizing the common challenges posed by real-world time inconsistencies and the difficulties in testing billing integrations, Stripe developed a hybrid logical clock concept that combines physical timestamps with ordered logical events, allowing users to fast-forward to significant billing events like subscription renewals or invoice generations. This approach reduces computational costs and ensures billing processes can be rigorously tested without disrupting production systems. The implementation involves a time provider that can switch between real-world and test clock time, ensuring no changes to existing business logic while enabling precise control over billing events in test environments. Test clocks provide developers with the ability to validate various billing scenarios, such as subscription cycles, trials, and discounts, offering a faster path to market readiness and deployment. By creating a test clock, businesses can attach customers and observe the effects on billing objects, enhancing the reliability of Stripe Billing integrations.