## TL;DR

If you do, your cleanup timing should match your setting, not the default. - Distinguish expired from async\_payment\_failed. Expired means the customer walked away.

## Steps

1. - You can set a custom expiry with `expires_at` when creating the session (between 30 minutes and 24 hours). If you do, your cleanup timing should match your setting, not the default.
- Distinguish `expired` from `async_payment_failed`. Expired means the customer walked away. The async failure events mean they tried and the money failed; those get dunning, not recovery emails.

## When to use

You are seeing this: The Checkout Session expired without payment (sessions expire 24 hours after creation by default). Use this skill when you run into "Stripe event: checkout.session.expired, release what you held and consider the recovery email".

## When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

## Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

## Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.