We've been building a lot of functionality on top of Stripe and we've been hearing from early users about the challenges of scaling Stripe's test mode.

Because you have 1 organizational account in Stripe and 1 test environment for that account, you can run in to a bunch of edge cases around how data is stored and deleted (or not). Blake wrote a separate post about those issues here [3].

We were excited to build this feature and write about it because we have gotten tired of making fake accounts which become hard to track because we're never sure what state each account is in.

Tier switch lets you spin up ephemeral test environments and you can instantly access them. It feels a lot more like a Netlify or Vercel deployment preview. This is nice when you are creating new Stripe backed features but they aren't in your main branch yet and you want to avoid polluting the test account that other members of your team might be using.

It's a pretty specific itch to scratch, but it has been one we've seen ourselves and heard about from a few others. Hopefully it will be useful to you too at some point.

1: https://github.com/tierrun/tier 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33429972 3: https://blog.tier.run/tier-switch-git-branch-for-stripe