notebook/docs/subscriptions.md

Subscriptions

When a user signs up, we automatically initialize a Stripe Customer object for them via Stripe's API, and subscribe them to the free (starter) subscription on Stripe, charging $0.00/month.

When a user visits the subscriptions page and clicks to upgrade to Premium:

• We first check to see if they have a payment method saved on Stripe.

  • If they do, we update their Stripe Customer's subscription to the Premium plan they've selected (with the change method), with no changes to payment method.
  • If they don't have a payment method on Stripe, we redirect them to a page for inputting one.
    • Upon submission, we kick off the information_change to save their payment method on Stripe and change their subscription plan.

• When we subscribe someone to Premium, we do the following on our side to track their subscription:

  1. Look for any currently active subscriptions (end_date > Today) and update their end_date to Datetime.now.
  2. Create a new Subscription for the newly-selected plan, and set an end_date of 5 years from now.

When a user visits the subscriptions page and clicks to downgrade to Starter:

• We update their Stripe Customer object's subscription to Starter, so they are properly prorated for unused time and aren't billed on the next cycle.
• We end any current Subscriptions on our side and create a new Subscription for the starter plan.

Billing

Since Stripe handles recurring subscriptions, we're just managing which plan they're subscribed to on Stripe, who handles billing on time, prorating, refunds, etc.

TODO

• Webhooks (for failed payments, successful payments, etc) are not implemented.
• Similarly, we should probably send an email to users after each of the above occurs.
• If a user's card is declined, we don't automatically downgrade them to starter (happens manually).
• There seems to be a bug somewhere where some users Subscriptions are ending early (and just need their end_date updated to a point in the distant future), but occurrences of this may just be from subscriptions that started before we began setting 5-year durations by default (from 31-day durations).
• It'd be very nice to abstract this out enough to support other payment methods like Paypal.