> Don’t use real card details. The Stripe Services Agreement prohibits testing in live mode using real payment method details. Use your test API keys and the card numbers below.
Either way I’d be hard pressed to deploy significant changes to payment-related code in production without at the very least seeing a real $1 charge go through and everything work as expected. The risk of a ToS enforcement for this seems much lower than the risk of some bad logic in an if (env == ‘prd’) making customers unable to give you money.
Rare production smoke tests are in a gray area. They may be technical violations but they're allowed to happen as long as they stay infrequent and above-board (company card, small amount, no chargeback, etc.).
You ocassionally see complaints about payment processors when microbusinesses do this and get banned. So it is something that does get checked ocassionally. (There's a top level comment about this)
I think the payment processor doesn't want you to do it because you may issue many transactions and then refund them which incurs cost, or you may be using it for manufactured spend which incurs issuer ire. Maybe it's a brown M&M thing; if you didn't read that part of the agreement, you didn't read anything else, and they may as well kick you out early and avoid hassle.
No disagreement from me that is what the letter of the Stripe service agreement says, but what happens in reality is clearly different. I take that rule as trying to encourage people to use the very good test environments Stripe offer, or to limit scale of test transactions in production, rather than trying to shutdown a paying user (the company) for trying a legitimate transaction in prod with a legitimate card. I have no idea why you would want to risk the first ever transaction in prod being performed by a real customer - why leave it to chance that it is not setup correctly?
I have also been on calls with Stripe support staff where we tried a card transaction in production for testing purposes, FWIW.
Yeah no.