What is best way to add membership/payments to your product?
I cannot stop thinking on the best way of how to provide membership capability to my product.
Let my start with my current landscape.
- Landing page -> aimfx.io is pure wordpress with Elementor / and plugin to collect emails.
- Backend / product -> is django / mysql application that is accessible after logging in.
- I have to create each account myself, but in case user forgot password it's forget pass functionality
Currently I am running beta tests and already have 80 people joined and ~35 using the tool. Everyone knows I will introduce monthly subscriptions to the tool and actually the only reason it's not yet there is - not sure how to do it in right way :)
I evaluate following options:
Custom development
- Add registration/profile page to Backend
- Add plan view - where I can list free/basic/premium and you can pick
- Your subscription view (upgrade/downgrade/cancel)
- ... and other
PROS: I will have everything under control.
CONS: Tone of development required to get this done (time...)
Expand wordpress with plugins
- Buy membership plugin -> https://memberpress.com/, this allows me to define plans, integrates well with paypal/stripe
- Buy elementor plugin - that will help me creating more user friendly landingpage / product page and memberships / subscriptions
- I can integrate with social connects like FB/TW connect
PROS: could deliver fast, could start selling product fast...
CONS:
- haven't done it before - not sure what I don't know,
- integration/sync should be made between wordpress and panel (product)
- in case I want to expose any data from panel, to wordpress (landingpage) that would require another integration - which provide complexity. Doable though..
CONCLUSION:
In general, I would prefer to build everything myself - to have full control on final product. Though, it's side project and I don't have time to spend 2-3 months building integration myself.
In case you could guide me or share your experience with providing membership - that charge users on recurring bases (monthly/yearly with discount), I would be pleased to hear.
Cheers!
Would definitely recommending finding the right SaaS products. Working through these sorts of challenges can take quite a lot of work and the default options provided out the of box are usually very limited. While you can write these yourself which usually takes ~800 hours by a professional team, they will be rife with legal compliance issues and security vulnerabilities.
Realistically, it sounds like you are looking for two different solutions:
# One to manage account billing (depending on your audience)
# One to manage users identity and authentication
Stripe came out with the 'billing customer portal' recently which makes adding membership so much easier. I had a demo up and running in less than 2 days of learning/coding.
Will check that, thx!
2-3 months is a huge amount of time, which you can use to actually develop your product instead. I would recommend using Stripe if your country is supported. If not, check Paddle or Gumroad or maybe even Paypal (again if your country is supported), all three options are good and have monthly/yearly option with discounts.
Yeah, I might go with Stripe. I checked they do have quite simple integration and Poland is on the list. Thx!
On top, do you have experience in stripe vs paypal? I read that stripe is powerful and lots of startups are using it. But some people prefers paypal.
Are there any constrains / benefits of having paypal over stripe, or maybe we should be thinking having both and letting user pick what suits them best?
We use Stripe. We have a pricing scheme that looks at per minute pricing and Stripe is flexible enough to allow for that. Worth looking into.
How about Memberspace / Memberstack?
From what I checked those are SaaS platforms to handle everything. I would like to limit number of external services I am using, just to simplify my landscape. I am thinking more on - I have a product, how to build user facing/user friendly website to offer it and allow people to buy/login...
Once I finish the product - I plan to do more analytics work around of the financial markets so aimfx.io will become more like information portal where some of information are exposed for free to public, some are enabled after you log in/subscribe.
Hi! Our web-based administrative application is built on Django and we use Stripe to handle memberships and payments. It's working pretty well. Was pretty straight forward. I highly recommend it. Strip has the ability to handle subscriptions, coupons, and trials.
How are you managing users in Django? Do you have any plans/authorization levels already built into your models?
For reference, it took me about 2 days (maybe 10-15 hours) to do the complete standup and testing of memberships, subs, coupons, trials, etc with Stripe on Django.
Make sense if you doing full time and can focus 100%. Any work related to this project I handle in the evening between 11PM and 1AM. Either way 2 work days still looks like low effort... Thx for sharing!
My project is still MVP kind of. whenever someone asks for account I go to Django Admin and just create an account/pass and share it with them :)
There is no plans / authorization levels built in... I plan to add this later. Currently if you have account you can do everything without any restrictions (except you are not staff, so dont have access to admin area)
I made some reading since yesterday and I see there are many social plugins for django - I might used that, as I dont want to handle user creation and having easy to use (one click connect with FB/Google/Twitter) is where I want to go next.