Comment by KraftyOne

Yes, if your workflow interacts with multiple external systems and you need it to fully back out and clean up after itself after a step fails, you'll need backup steps--this is basically a saga pattern.

Where DBOS helps is in ensuring the entire workflow, including all backup steps, always run. So if your service is interrupted and that causes the Stripe call to fail, upon restart your program will automatically retry the Stripe call and if that doesn't work, back out and run the step that closes out the failed purchase.