I am not sure why this isn't better documented (at least not that I could easily find), but often times when building a subscription-based service (SaaS) you may want to offer a free plan along with your premium paid plans. I am not talking about a free trial period, but a forever free plan. For some reason, the Laravel documentation wants to assume only that you would offer a free trial period. There are a couple ways you could handle offering a free Stripe plan using Laravel, but I am going to highlight the one I prefer. The reason I prefer this method is it makes upgrading, downgrading, and managing customers much simpler if you don't have to worry about the backend headaches of having free users configured one way and paid users another way. With this method they are all managed by Stripe, and when you want to upgrade you simply pass billing information, and if you want to downgrade a user you can simply use the Stripe API to handle the plan switch. For brevity, I am going to … [Read more...] about Creating a Free Stripe Plan using Laravel 5
saas billing
PayPeek – A Subscription Billing Solution for Your Business
I am excited to announce the upcoming launch of PayPeek. PayPeek is a subscription billing, recurring billing, and customer management platform. With PayPeek the headaches of managing your online business are eliminated. Save time and costs in developing your backend processing. PayPeek is a feature-rich dashboard that manages your customers, subscriptions, billing, and reporting. Unlike other solutions PayPeek is a self-hosted platform. This means a one-time fee and no monthly or per-transaction fees. Subscription Billing Building an e-commerce website can be a complex task. Worrying about subscription billing, handling credit card errors, managing customers and invoicing customers takes valuable time away from focusing on your business. While there are plenty of systems that will happily host your data and charge you additional transaction fees, PayPeek eliminates that need. The recent credit card breaches are a sign that not all systems are safe. Why add an extra layer that stores … [Read more...] about PayPeek – A Subscription Billing Solution for Your Business