Accepting Recurring Payments and Subscriptions on a Budget

November 30, 2015 2:32 PM

I'm researching how to easily offer recurring payments/subscriptions on services I provide (software support). Thought I'd just use PayPal, but dragons seem to be just below the surface. Help!

Hello all,

In my quest to monetize an awesome open source app I've been developing since I lived in a dorm room in College, I've decided that part of the value-added services I will be offered will be VIP support. Rejoice! I've decided to get on board with Zendesk and my experience so far has been good enough to keep on it. Thanks for the feedback of my last AskMe post.

The next piece of the puzzle is a big one:

I'd like to offer my services on a subscription basis: monthly, or yearly, etc. I thought I'd use PayPal's recurring payments system (as I use them now for one-time payments), but it's unclear to me how I am to find out through their system when a subscription has been cancelled by the buyer, and their docs are a little perplexing - there seems to be 5 different versions of the same docs. Ugh. And you know, it's PayPal.

So, as not to reinvent the wheel, which I do not have time to do (and on top of that: I'll do a bad job, as I'm focusing on my own thing), are there services that would help me out with this? Both myself and the customer needs to know what their subscription plan is, and how to extend it or cancel it easily. I need to know at a glance if a subscription is valid and also how I can allow/disallow my customers downloads/resources that they have/have not paid for.

Support for Open Source apps aren't going to be bringing in mad cash, so I'm hoping that the service would have some sort of plan to take a percentage.

I'm very unfamiliar with what's available - I've been chugging along with the same (lame) PayPal script I whipped up a decade+ ago. The big problem is that I'm not getting recurring payments done by my clients manually, as it's too much bother, so I'm losing a ton of retention. Not good.

Any suggestions on how I can get up and running, quickly?

posted by alex_skazat to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I don't know how it compares to PayPal cost- or ease-of-use-wise, but Stripe seems to have recurring billing and AFAIK a good reputation.
posted by brentajones at 2:41 PM on November 30, 2015

Stripe Stripe Stripe.
posted by DarlingBri at 2:42 PM on November 30, 2015

My company uses Stripe, too. They're an industry leader at this sort of thing.
posted by bluefly at 2:43 PM on November 30, 2015

Response by poster: Here seems the relevant info the Stripe provides:

https://stripe.com/docs/tutorials/subscriptions

Is stripe mostly US-only? Meaning, I can only use this for US customers, or that because I live in the US, they are OK with me being their customer?
posted by alex_skazat at 2:46 PM on November 30, 2015

Response by poster: ...and the answer to that question,

https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-countries-does-stripe-support

Figure out my endpoint stuff (kinda like PayPal, but hopefully not as evil), get an https cert so people can enter CC info on my site (right), and make some fancy looking buttons, and I should be good to go.
posted by alex_skazat at 4:34 PM on November 30, 2015

If you don't want to actually build any software, get yourself a Plasso account. It's a decent-looking layer on top of Stripe that gets you everything you would be building anyway. Mike Perham (big in the Ruby community, makes Sidekiq) wrote an article the other day titled How to Charge for Open Source that you might find interesting as well.
posted by zrail at 4:47 PM on November 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks zrail. Maybe Plasso is what I can use to get this out the door sooner. My interest really is to focus on what I'm good at in the here and now, rather than launch into yet another internal project. If it isn't, I may just struggle with PayPal for now, and launch the recurring payments phase down the road.

Great article as well - that describes me almost perfectly (much to my S.O.'s chagrin). I'll have to research the AGPL, my app is currently licensed under the GPLv2 (hey, that's what we had way back when!). Relicensing it may/may not prove difficult - I'll have to see if the libraries I currently use are compatible (your usually OS zoo of licenses), but I can honestly say that all the code written in my app is mine, as I'm the sole developer. I have to also see if this makes sense for a self-hosted app.
posted by alex_skazat at 4:59 PM on November 30, 2015

I use Chargebee (handles billing and hosts the payment pages) connected to Stripe for my business.
posted by GatorX3 at 1:15 PM on December 1, 2015