Stripe webhook events are not ordered, so state must be read from the object not the sequence

Stripe explicitly does not guarantee delivery order. A customer.subscription.updated for a cancellation can arrive before the update that preceded it, and invoice.paid can land before invoice.created. Retries make this worse, because a failed event retries on its own schedule while newer events keep flowing. State machines that assume a sequence leave subscriptions on the wrong tier after a plan change.

Confirm by comparing stored event.created timestamps against receipt times over a busy day. Either fetch the current object from the API inside the handler and persist that, or store the last applied event.created per object and discard anything older. The second approach avoids the extra API call but needs a per-object column; a single global watermark silently drops events for other objects.