Ask HN: Simplest way to add paid subscription plan to my webapp? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Simplest way to add paid subscription plan to my webapp?

10 pointsMarkMc8 comments

I have a popular webapp that is currently free for all users and doesn't require login. I want to add an optional feature that will require the user to pay $5 per month.

How can I do this with the least amount of code? Is there a platform-as-a-service that integrates Google sign-in and Stripe subscription billing?

Ideally I want to just include a line of javascript (provided by the platform) to my web pages which adds a 'Log in/Register' button in the top-right corner of my webapp - then I just check the user's subscription status on the server to enable the feature. I don't want to mess around with Google authentication tokens or Stripe webhook callbacks.

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I'm using Chargebee for www.dynablogger.com. It's an awesome subscription management service that is super quick to integrate with your app and supports many gateways. It has s ton of features and it's completely free until you reach 50k in revenue. I spent a couple of hours to add Chargebee to my app and literally a few minutes to link Stripe and PayPal to Chargebee. You can change gateways etc with a few clicks without touching your app.

The code using Stripe is very minimal so you can do it yourself but if you are absolutely against it, then you can consider services like paddle or more established subscription/billing services like recurly, chargebee etc.

My understanding of Stripe is that it would require quite a bit of coding. As a bare minimum I would have to implement:

- Some sort of login system which populates a Users table on my server

- An HTML/Javascript component which (if the user is logged in) shows the user's name and has a drop-down menu 'My Account' and 'Logout', or (if the user is not logged in) a 'Login/Register' button

- A 'My Account' web page to show the user's current subscription plan and the option to cancel it or upgrade to a better plan, and a way for the user to delete their user account

- A webhook called by Stripe which updates the status of the user account in the database

I agree. We are working on a service to provide all this, but still in early phases. If you want to be a beta tester drop me a line at davide@vernizzis.it

It's really, really not if you're in the EU. Lots of juggling with payment intents, web hooks, handling possible payment reauthentication requests.

I forgot to mention, mainly because of SCA.

I don't think you're going to find anything that glues together auth and billing like you want.

I'd look at Auth0, Firebase, and adjacent products for the auth part.

Stripe really does the heavy lifting with subscriptions, shouldn't be much work to implement.

I’ve never used it, but something like https://www.memberstack.io/ does what you’re looking for.

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