[davismwfl]

We create a Stripe customer at the same time the customer registers. At that same time we assign them to a "free" plan at Stripe. Then once they decide on which plan and to stay on and be a subscriber we update their plan to the new plan. Stripe then charges them for it and sets the recurrence etc.

You can also setup the plans to have a grace period before they are charged with Stripe.

As for how we actually implement it, we create a small service around subscriptions and it is called by our create steps which then hides the calls to Stripe. This way if we ever went away from Stripe it would only require some small changes in the subscription service.

Also, we store the Stripe customer id and card id in our subscription record, and we do it using a generic data structure where we list vendor, vendor customerId and vendor cardId etc. This way nothing is labeled Stripe, except the vendor value itself would be Stripe in our case.

Lastly we also have a web hook active so we can get notifications from Stripe and update records appropriately. Again, a small separate service that handles only the web hooks.

[user3487]

Thank you for the magnificent answer. It seems like a good idea to create a separate service to handle the registration. My app is backed by a REST API (I know, I am so trendy), so it would just be to call that one and a call to Stripe's API and be done.

One thing I realized now, reading your answer, is that the customer's plans should be changed depending by the user's usage (think storage space). Should I be running a cron job once or twice a day to check the usage, compare it to their subscription plan and update it at Stripe? Of course notify them by email, and maybe give them a day to re-do and not give them unexpected charges.

[davismwfl]

So if your plans vary based on usage patterns and that carries additional charges, then yes, you'll have to run some sort of scheduled job to check for users getting close to plan thresholds. IMO you don't want to auto upgrade people, but rather warn them at say 80%, then 90% and give them the option to upgrade or be frozen at their current use level. This prevents chargebacks and complaints for auto upgrades they didn't want to have happen. Seems you already are on that path.

But on the other hand (thinking storage space), if your model is such that they pay $9.99/month with up to 5gb and for every gb over 5 they pay $0.99 say. Then you can auto charge the incremental fees and just make sure you are sending the clients an email and keeping them in the loop. I have not done this with Stripe myself so I am not sure the best way to set it up, but my initial guess would say you leave their base plan alone (unless they upgrade/downgrade it) and just add a surcharge to their account at Stripe if they go over their allotted storage space. One way I can think of off the top of my head is to change their account balance to be -$.99, or whatever their overage is, so that Stripe can bill that plus their next monthly service. But I am sure there is likely a more elegant solution.

Someone else mentioned Chargebee, which is a great service, but we chose not to go the route of like a Chargebee because paying additional fees on top of Stripe just didn't fit our model initially, and we feel our chargeback risk is very low. But if you have a higher risk business with a greater potential for chargebacks and disputes then it is best to insulate your self as best you can, and Chargebee helps you do that. In our case, we actually can process charges through Stripe or Balanced payments (although 100% is going through Stripe right now), which is why we did the vendor based model as I described above, that was our insurance in case we every had problems with one provider.

[user3487]

This is amazing, thank you again! It seems that the way you have decided to solve this is both scalable and modular, so it's very likely that I will adopt it. I will talk with my business people about the best solution for us on handling tier upgrades, notification etc. Right now you have assured me I can let the subscription integration wait, so I'll continue focusing on the actual product and implement the subscription later.

[davismwfl]

Awesome, glad I could help some, good luck!