Stripe create Subscription with payment method in one go instead of two

Question

for my subscription based product I want to have a possibility to subscribe and enter payment details at once with stripe and struggle with that with the api.

In https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/build-subscriptions?ui=elements I see an option to create a subscription with payment_behavior='default incomplete' and then enter the details to confirm the payment intent. So far so good. However if I create the subscription like that even before the customer confirms payment details stripe already generates an invoice which is not really what I want before final confirmation by customer.

Options I see:

1. create setupintent, have this filled by customer via elements and then have the customer subscribe. Technically works nicely but for a sales and customer perspective is not good as it has two steps thus probably reduces conversion.
2. create the subscription in the background before final subscription confirmation by customer and use the clientsecret of it to pass back to browser and then have customer enter his payment data and submit that and finish the setup of subscription and payment info. Technically works - however I realize that when I create the subscription to get the clientsecret to pass to elements before the customer enters his payment data and confirms the subscription the subscription is not only created but an invoice too - which would be really, i.e. an invoice created before customers really confirms the contract
3. create setupintent and submit it via elements and in metadata of it add the info of product that customers wants so that when the paymentmethod gets created and I get webhook event I do the booking of the product given in metainfo. May however mean the customer gets to success page but the webhook has not notified yet and thus the customer is not really subscrubed at the point in time but gets a success message he is
4. same as 3 except do not pass info via metadata but via successUrl parameters which refers to and endpoint at my backend which upon being called after setupintent was setup will do the subscription and then redirect to my frontend which shows success page. That seems like a error prone workaround however.
5. Create a workflow which is a 2 step sign up and asks for paymentinfo, sets that up and then brings customer to a final confirmation page where the submit triggers subscription creation. Seems a bit complicated from a user flow, but so far probably the best option?

Any better options?

Cheers Tom

ps: Interestingly enough on discord stripe support told me #2 is the way to go - find it hard to believe ...

Answer 1

As far as I know, there isn't a workaround for this unfortunately. It is just how Subscriptions API is designed by Stripe. You can learn more about that here where they talk about "how subscriptions work".