According to the documentation Google Wallet seems to only support monthly recurring subscriptions.
I'd to charge users annually for the use of an application hosted on AppEngine (purely to be able to offer the user a better price and reduce administrative costs). Are there any plans to support annually recurring subscriptions?
Or is there a way to configure the current subscription system to behave as an annual subscription system?
Technically there's no way to configure an annual subscription. But I suppose you can work around it: Request an initial payment for the entire first year and then a monthly-recurring payment at a discount.
For example, suppose you offer a monthly plan that costs $100. And you want to offer an annual plan for $900 (25% discount). Instead, you may offer an initial payment of $900 followed by 36 monthly-recurring payments of $75.
What this means for your business is that once a user has paid for and used your service for an entire year then you start treating her as a "loyal customer" and let her keep paying the discount price without committing for another year.
Wallet for Digital Goods currently only supports a monthly frequency for subscriptions.
https://developers.google.com/commerce/wallet/digital/docs/jsreference#jwt
there is no official solution for an annual subscription, but you could implement a solution similar to what #oferei or #EdSF suggested in their posts.
Related
The subscription plan
I have a subscription plan available at my app which I need to model with Stripe.
The subscription plan details are the following:
A fixed amount of $20/month or $200/year (discounted) that the user must pay.
With the previous fixed amount the user can consume 2500 units of the product per month.
If the user consume more than 2500 units in one month every additional unit has a value of $0,01.
Examples
A user choose the subscription plan with the $20/month option and in the first month he/she consumes 2520 units.
The total amount to pay for the first month of the subscription for this user is:
$20 fixed amount
20 additional units * $0,01 = $0,2
Total to pay: $20 + $0,2 = $20,2
A user choose the subscription plan with the $200/year option. In the first month he/she consumes 500 units. In the second month he/she consumes 5000 units.
For the first month this user needs to pay:
$200 because is starting the subscription
No additional units.
Total to pay: $200
For the second month this user needs to pay:
No fixed amount because the fixed yearly quantity has already been paid.
2500 additional units * $0,01 = $25
Total to pay: $25
Problems
My biggest problem modeling this with Stripe payments is that is not possible to have prices with different intervals in the same subscription.
If the user chooses the yearly fixed price is not possible to create a subscription on Stripe that has a fixed yearly pay (of $200 in this case) and a monthly graduated price (for the additional consumed units).
I have seen that the subscription upsell feature is something very similar to what a I need. But once it's activated I can't find any way on the API to enable it when the subscription is created (I'm not using checkout).
I have seen also that it's possible to create two subscriptions, one for the yearly pay and another one for the monthly units. But creating two subscriptions make everything really difficult, you need to take into account two subscription states and callbacks are more difficult this way too.
Questions
What is the best and simple way to model this subscription plan using Stripe?
Note: I'm doing a custom integration with Stripe, so the subscriptions and customer are created via API. I'm not using Stripe checkout.
My biggest problem modeling this with Stripe payments is that is not possible to have prices with different intervals in the same subscription.
Indeed, you can't combine Price objects with different intervals on a single Subscription. Otherwise, this pricing is possible by combining a flat rate fee with metered usage as outlined here.
Your best option in cases where your customers elect for the annual fixed fee is to roll with a single usage based Price and amend the initial invoice to include that a one-off Invoice Item for the annual fixed fee.
I have seen that the subscription upsell feature is something very similar to what a I need. But once it's activated I can't find any way on the API to enable it when the subscription is created (I'm not using checkout).
Subscription upsells are a Checkout only feature right now. However this is not really related to the problem you're facing (it just provides a UI for your customers to upgrade to an annual Price for the same Product).
I have a website in which I use Stripe and its NodeJS SDK. In particular, I use the checkout feature.
The problem is this: I have a product and I want to earn, let's say, 100€ for each sold product. In this moment this is not possible, because when the user pays, I will have stripe's fees removed from the 100€.
Is there a way to specify: "this is the price that I want to earn, without the fees, the additional fees will be paid by the user"?
Or do I have to increase manually the price and adjust it so that after the fees it will result in 100€?
It’s not possible to do that automatically, you need to manually compute the amount that includes the Stripe fee. The formula to compute that amount is explained here.
However, note that:
You cannot really know the Stripe fees in advance when using Checkout, since they will change depending on the Payment Method used (for example cards in EU have a different fee than cards in the US). You can learn more about Stripe pricing here.
And in some jurisdictions, charging processing fees to your customers is prohibited by law (as explained in the first link I shared).
So instead of customizing the price to each charge, I would recommend to directly set the price to cover your own costs of doing business (including credit card processing fees). For example, charge your customers 102€ for your 100€ product.
I am currently in the process of creating the billing system for my first SaaS. A simple tool to generate videos. There will be a free, mid, and pro tier. The main difference will be the number of minutes you can generate per month.
I created 3 Stripe products for the tiers. The free product consists of one price ($0) with a monthly charge interval. The mid and pro tier consists of 2 prices, a monthly and annual charge interval.
When a user signs up for an account, my backend automatically creates a Stripe customer and subscribe it to a free plan. A user can upgrade their account to a mid or pro tier. The plan will be downgraded to a free tier when the user cancels or if the payment failed.
I reset the number of available render minutes after each successful payment, at the start of the billing month. I do this by listening to the successful payment Stripe webhooks. Even when the user is on the free tier, the webhook still gets fired since it is a plan.
The problem is that this method would not work for annual plans.
Which made me think that the method that I went for may not be the correct one.
Do you know if this is a good method if there is a better one and if there is a workaround for annual subscriptions?
Thank you very much for your time.
I think for the annual billing you'll likely want to just set up a cron job or similar that runs daily, and that looks at which annual subscriptions' 'billing day anniversary' (i.e., billing date is Aug 7, so billing day anniversary is the 7th of each month) and resets the counts - unless it is the billing date, in which case leave it to your webhook.
I am creating a Stripe Connect marketplace which charges a fixed fee based on value of sales, e.g. up to £2500 of revenue (for a connected account in a calendar month) will incur a flat fee of £200 per month to the platform.
I have read the Stripe documentation but still quite unclear how I can achieve this using a Standard Connect account. I understand the concept behind adding a flat fee per transaction but my use case is based around the amount of revenue over a time period.
Any help is always appreciated.
it sounds like you want to keep track of the payments processed by your connected accounts in order to figure out what to charge them.
The best way to do this is probably to set up a Connect webhook and listen for events like charge.succeeded and keep a running total each month for each account.
You have a number of options for charging your accounts, but using Billing to create a subscription that you update as their revenue grows is probably the best experience. You could also use metered billing with pricing tiers based on the payments you track.
If you need to calculate historic revenue, you'd need to manually retrieve the payments and calculate the total for the month(s) you're interested in.
NOTE: For both the webhook events and the retrieval approaches you'd need to be aware of several different objects other than Charges that may affect revenue up or down, like PaymentIntents, Refunds, Disputes etc depending on the details of the connect account's integration.
Hope that helps!
I've read all the documentation on this I could find (maybe there is more?) and I'm still unclear on the $2 fee per active account per month.
If I am building a peer to peer e-commerce platform, let's say there are 100 active user accounts.
Of those 100, 10 active accounts sell goods and 90 active accounts are only purchasers of goods from those 10 sellers.
Would the $2 fee be for only the accounts that are selling? Or all 100? This would be a significant monthly cost difference at $20/month vs $200/month.
Thanks in advance for any guidance.
Would the $2 fee be for only the accounts that are selling? Or all 100?
Stripe has multiple products, what you are asking about is the seller side. (https://stripe.com/en-nl/connect)
Connect accounts allow you to manage your sellers - onboard them, verify them (fradulent?), transfer funds to their connected accounts and pay them out.
If you want to integrate payments, you will also need Stripe Payments - https://stripe.com/en-nl/payments
Payments are usually charged per transaction, so I would do some forecast of potential traffic.
Their pricing also depends on the countries you are buying/selling in so I would definitely recommend to check with their sales team and get a quota. They are really helpful and professional.
Maybe a list of useful heads up questions:
Does your platform operates in one country or there is a plan to expand?
What is the average price of goods that are traded (if you take payment cost - is it worth it)?
Are your sellers risky?
Are your buyers risky?
What kind of payment methods will your buyers use?
Do you think your sellers want customized onboarding experience? Can you justify additional cost of onboarding?
No need to share responses, but prepare yourself if you plan to negotiate contract.
I hope this is helpful!