How do you combine sign up and payment in one checkout flow?
I've been building a few SaaS products and the sign up and payment workflow is driving me crazy. Every implementation I've seen requires the customer to register first and then collect payment separately. It kills the flow and I'm sure it hurts conversions. Am I missing something or is this just something everyone works around?
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You’re not missing anything - this is a real problem.
Most setups split “account creation” and “payment” because of how auth + billing systems are built, not because it’s actually a good user experience.
What’s been working better for me:
From the user’s perspective:
Way smoother, and removes that “commit before value” friction.
I’ve been rethinking a lot of these flows recently while building a project where onboarding has to feel almost frictionless - otherwise people just bounce immediately.
Curious how others are handling this.
We ended up treating signup as a side effect of payment rather than a separate step.
Let them pay first, then create the account from that event. Trying to force a clean “signup → payment” flow sounds nice, but it usually just adds friction.
The main thing is making sure retries and failures don’t create duplicate users or charges. That’s where it tends to get messy.