--- title: Beta testing new Subscription creation flow slug: beta-testing-new-subscription-creation-flow published_at: 2020-09-30 12:42:42 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:44 +0000 summary: description: tags: [] views: 45 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/beta-testing-new-subscription-creation-flow youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWVQfx1sQHI youtube_id: sWVQfx1sQHI embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/sWVQfx1sQHI thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sWVQfx1sQHI/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Beta testing new Subscription creation flow *Published: September 30, 2020* *Views: 45* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWVQfx1sQHI) [![Beta testing new Subscription creation flow](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sWVQfx1sQHI/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWVQfx1sQHI) ## Description ## Transcript [Music] [Music] all right welcome today we're going to be hacking on and experimenting with a new subscription flow for starting subscriptions this is still in beta but we'll sort of change the order of operations in the order of the api calls that you make when setting up a subscription for the first time um so today what we're going to do is look at an example an example implementation and then sort of implement our own and kind of try to go through and update one of the striped samples that will be coming out soon and sort of experimenting with that so that is the plan uh here is some code for the existing example the big change here is that we have we will we're thinking about adding this new payment behavior with uh default incomplete again if you'd like to participate in the beta we would love to hear from you so if you're thinking about starting an integration which creates subscriptions let us know and we can add you to the beta if you're watching this at some much later date then it's possible totally possible this api has changed so this is like 100 not guaranteed to work and is also um really just to kind of like see how it feels and provide some feedback to the product team so that we can get a sense for how this product and feature works so yeah this is kind of uh the first thing we want to do is try to implement this so before we go too far i actually need to add myself to the beta so we'll do that first off screen since it's yeah sort of a private process here so um when we're experimenting with features we'll want to go through and make sure that we are in the correct betas uh i'm i'd love to hear what you're working on if you want to leave a comment below or if you have a specific request for a live stream that would be awesome to hear um yeah curious to see what folks are doing these days let's see okay i should have added myself before i started this stream that's okay give me a moment just a moment here so one of the complications that we're trying to solve with this is all the edge cases that you have to deal with on the client side when starting a subscription in an sca ready way you'll notice that from our stripe samples if we look at the the client-side code over here for just starting a fixed price subscription there's quite a bit in this script.js file if i just zoom out right like this is a pretty big file pretty massive file with lots of error handling and one of our aims is to try to simplify that and another aim is to uh another aim is to start supporting more payment methods for subscriptions so we need to make this change in order to unlock some of those features and so yeah today we're going to kind of experiment with that and see how it feels it needs to be updated so we should be able to take advantage of this new feature now let's do the very first thing first and let's just make a raw request to create a subscription with this same this same sort of uh argument from the command line so i have a uh the stripe cli already installed um we want to create a customer we want to pass it a customer id and then a price a price id so i'm going to say stripe customers list limit one so i just grab one customer i'm going to pipe to jq and say give me the first customer's id so that i have a customer id i'm going to do the same thing with um prices uh of type uh recurring so that i can get a one time or a recurring price and i want to say straight subscriptions create customer is going to be this customer and then the um items see items price is going to be set to this price id and i think yeah and then we're here we're expanding the latest payment intent but i don't really care about that so i do want to pass payment behavior payment behavior is equal to default incomplete um okay cool so that created a default incomplete payment i'm sorry subscription and by default this thing was expanding the latest invoices payment intent i believe that's what we're trying to confirm on the client and when we confirm it on the client that is what how this all works so i'm going to actually clone down this is a private repository which will eventually become a stripe sample but i want to clone it down and just start playing with it so let's pull this down again today we're beta testing the subscription flow the subscription start flow a new subscription create flow um repository not found could not read from repository it is there does it want this other version i've got some weird ssh setup going on okay cool so we've got this downloaded now if we go into the fixed price subscriptions and cd into the server cd into ruby copy my environment variables here bundle install and then um see cool okay so then if i start the server ruby server and navigate to localhost 4242 should see the sample somewhere we do not see the sample 404 okay so then if we look at the tree dot okay so i guess we need to go up and over into vanilla js so let's edit my environment variables to say client slash vanilla js i don't know if it needs the trailing slash there rails no ruby server they restart the ruby server again refresh the page okay so very first thing that we are encountering here is a sign up page so this sign up page corresponds with what so let's jump into this okay so in the fixed price subscriptions client i believe it's going to be rendering the index.html page but let's just take a look so the yeah so the root route is sending the file the index.html page and on that page we have a whole bunch of stuff and we're using okay so we're using some like normalized css and really trying to make it look good i i really just want to see exactly the stripe bits and nothing else so i'm going to spend a little bit of time here deleting some things um because these should be insignificant i believe um yeah so like there's a sign up but there's a sign in button but i don't think it does anything so there's a few things here that just don't don't work or don't um aren't used yeah okay so this whole thing you don't need all these classes um yeah okay so let's just say the form is a single sign up form button and then here and delete all this and okay all right so yeah this is just so much extra code that i don't think we need here and the footer was outside of the body that's surprising okay let's see what it looks like now all right cool email address with a sign up button great uh maybe we have like may like or no main and let's give this style uh main max with like i don't know 800 pixels all right sure any dot rosin at example.com when we click sign up what happens well it's kind of hard to see from here i believe something in script.js is firing set up the sign up page so this is going to create a customer and then redirect so let's simplify this a little bit and just move it into the index.html page [Music] so what are we doing here when we click on sign up we are [Music] creating a customer and then redirecting right okay but this does not need to be done on the client necessarily we could just be like submitting the form and doing a full page redirect and here we're like redirecting on the client to this customer customer id on the client but we don't need to do this on the client at all we can do it on the server so here we're here's our create customer function this also can be probably just moved to an inline script tag here okay so here we have a create customer call we're passing in the email address of the customer that all looks good and then we're returning the result of that fetch call and then down here we use that when we say create the customer and then we're redirecting client side whatever that's fine i'm not going to worry about this loading state um and i'm not going to worry about this if statement anymore because we're loading the script tag at the bottom of the page and we know how this we know how this all works now okay it's all in one place and this should all work sort of as expected in fact like we don't even need the script tag at the top i don't think um and now we're like sort of self-contained so one other thing i might do is just remove all the css actually let's use yeah let's use our standard office hour css okay and now our button looks weird so we have sign up and signing up yeah we just need really sign up keep it simple keeping it simple here don't need all of those classes uh okay the email address is required that's solid type is email email address okay all right so jenny got rosen at example.com when we click sign up we expect that on this index.html page we are hitting this submit handler evt is a bit of an odd choice for the name of the event i would prefer e or event just a personal preference but um so it doesn't look as good but it definitely is simpler to understand okay so we're going to create the customer um so let's yeah let's go in here create the customer this is going to be making an api call to the back end and we expect that it's going to return with some json um okay and it looks like it did and so if we look at the network tab we can see the create customer call happened um and we don't see the response because i wasn't hanging out over here but that's okay and then we should be returning from this promise here and then entering this next dot then call which will resolve with this result and now that has the customer object and here's all the details including the email address that we filled in and it has a customer id so that's cool and we're about to redirect the customer to prices.html okay so let's do that all right so now we're redirected to the prices page and we have a customer id that was created and so we're like sort of logged in now so that is fantastic um okay next step is we want to see how this page works proceed to payment i'm not sure what that means like why is that i don't know why that's there all right let's go edit the prices.html page try to simplify as much as we can um so we're going to remove some css stuff and let's try to figure out what's going on here um okay we don't need this we don't need this we don't need this we don't need any of this stuff yeah it was kind of written i guess like a bit more like a sales demo than sort of like a demo that just kind of just showed the stripe stuff uh okay so we have this div that says select a plan um yeah sure okay and then we have a prices form which is gonna show all of our prices uh again i'm gonna just delete um this hopefully it is semantic enough that we should be able to still um view the view the html like view the page and it should not be messy and build monthly okay so okay on click wow we're using an on click select price basic okay interesting yeah all of this is just a style stuff okay all right so okay um still doing some cleanup here deleting classes deleting classes deleting classes okay build monthly it's on that one we're collect we're selecting premium and then this whole proceed to payment situation here is that so that you can sort of select and then click proceed to payment that's kind of that's interesting um instead i'm just going to make it see if you click on the button that's the price that's the one that you picked right like that is the that is the price level that you picked and then we're going to move on to the next thing so this whole entire bottom this is a stripe sample thing can all go again yeah i'm wondering why this footer is placed below the body that is unexpected for sure okay right okay this is stuff that you might do in practice like when you're building a real application but for demonstration purposes we want to try to keep it simple here let's keep it simple subscription creation errors this sounds important and we likely want to populate that with errors if there were errors while creating the subscription um okay so proceed to payment this this whole thing yeah we're taking this out okay so [Music] once you have okay so we've got to figure out what is this select price situation select price um okay so what does this function do wow there's a lot all right it adds selected it removes selected it sets the inner text okay and none of that is valuable for demonstration disabled okay so change price selection change price selection that do okay this again is all um this is again all just like styling stuff right okay so let's continue to simplify here back in prices.html we have select a plan [Music] yeah there's just so many buttons here and so many things that i feel like we want just a single button with text that says select and we can have an id that says like basic it's a bit basic um and then we can just use uh instead of using an on click we can register a click handler actually sure let's use on click that's fine select price um i don't know why we have a name that's okay so here we're basically just saying like this is a basic five dollars a month plan five dollars per month build monthly i think that's super clear let's just say that it looks like this um okay so then separately we have the same thing but a premium which is 15 a month okay and then i'm just going to delete all this stuff um we don't even need this form anymore okay let's see what it looks like refresh the page here we go select a plan basic five dollars a month select premium 15 a month select great so now what we want to do is modify this so that when clicked what was this doing before so it was doing select price which was not actually it was just changing the style of the price so what was the other okay oh this is tricky to follow okay we're just we're working on simplifying here so that we can see exactly what's happening okay so the price picker setup price selection page this [Music] customer might have returned to the payment page from a different page okay so we don't care about any of that um price picker submit when we submit the form we want to grab the customer id from the params good we want to grab the subscription id from the prams i don't know we don't have a subscription id in the params so i am not sure if that is the right even the right page okay so this is super confusing um from price change oh okay set default payment method retrieve upcoming invoice cancel subscription api call okay why does that one say api call instead of just cancel subscription i don't know okay um yeah i all right so change loading state we don't care about the loading state anymore get selected price id um that whatever that doesn't seem valuable set the price id in local storage no clear cash no reset the demo no okay none of those are valuable for the demo okay confirm price change okay so all of this is style this is all style okay we don't need any of that style this is all style we don't need any of that style this is also all [Music] style which again does not matter okay so this thing on subscription sample demo complete show success error message when the payment is complete all right this one is also all style get customers payment method get customers payment okay so we're calling this on page load and we're saying grab the query okay so oh my gosh wow okay all right we're going to come back to that i think it's used by something else get beta string get date string from unix timestamp nope uh capitalize first letter nope get formatted amount uh okay so this is just like a little helper that gives us given the amount even an integer amount in cents in usd sense get us the formatted amount in us dollars with the dollar sign um yeah i'm not going to use that so let's just delete it hit config okay so this is pulling our stripe publishable key and setting up stripe elements so we will need this for one of the pages at least retrieve customer payment method update subscription cancel subscription simple subscription api call why are those two different things cancel subscription api call all right let's just move this into here and then move this to here um [Music] it was taking in the api okay so this was actually past the subscription id so we don't need that anymore so we just need yeah we just need this part right here okay uh what else so that means that we can delete this function that's cool um subscription canceled return subscription canceled i don't even there's not even okay that method doesn't exist so retrieve upcoming set default payment method okay on subscription complete that seems like something later confirm price change okay um that seems like we're modifying the subscription switch prices new price id selected so we are getting the price id i'm not sure why search.substring1 is happening here getting the current subscription price id getting the customer id getting the subscription id updating the border to show which price is selected okay so we're not updating anything anymore king's loading state retrieve the upcoming invoice that might happen still i think this is later go to price picker go to price picker okay so this just is a helper to redirect to the price picker page change price demo change price that oh gosh okay that function does nothing now go to payment page all right so all right i feel like we're not actually doing any of the demo for the new flow we're just being confused by existing stripe sample so here we've done we've done the customer creation we know this bit works we know that we got back a customer id with the stuff expanded and then we got to this prices page and we have the customer id i'm sorry yeah that was that was not create subscription that was create customer so we got back the customer id the customer id is here we redirected this prices page now we're going to select a price and when we select a price we should be able to create a custom create a subscription from there so i'm going to just update this prices page to have an inline script tag at the bottom that says grab reference to the submit the basic button submit basic and when it's clicked i want to make an api call to the server to create subscription i'm going to pass in the price id um basic okay all right and then we'll take a look at the logs what happens so if i click on this thing wait what okay we should not be loading script.js anymore okay cool what is my network error create subscription 400 error bad request missing param customer okay so the customer is supposed to come out of the url params um so in practice this id should never be work like handled in the front end you're going to be using this id on the server and it'll be stored next to your authenticated user so if you have a user that's authenticated then next to them you would store their stripe customer id and then you would retrieve that customer id when you're making these calls you would not ever pass in the customer id from the front end okay what's going on here okay the name in the params is customer id so let's refresh the page click select month cool make it 400 missing required items okay so the server when we're doing create customer expecting that in the environment variables we have a plan or a price created called basic that has the value of a recurring price same with premium it wants a premium price stripe prices list type recurring type jq um let's do data pipe um dot id dot mount might be unit amount unit unit amount cool so we've got one here this is a five dollar price so that'll be our basic and we've got a 14 price that'll be our premium okay we start our server go back to our create subscription call refresh the page click select price on basic all right we got a 200 and we got back a full subscription that is in the incomplete state suite that is awesome okay so the next thing that i want to do is from the prices page i guess after we have successfully selected a price and created a subscription i think we want to redirect the pay page paid.html and on this page you enter your your full name and your card information i believe this is how this is supposed to work so we want to redirect to um let's see so actually let's yeah console.log data back brush the page click on the button once we get our subscription i think we want to probably have the subscription id in the query string params i believe let's take a look at pay our details how much is due now oh gosh okay footer again oh gosh subscribe okay uh it might be kind of fun to do like a demo where we just style something uh where we style a stripe sample but having the striped samples with all the styles really makes it extra confusing so i think we should probably remove all of this and really just keep it super simple okay i'm just going to kill the form was the id though payment form in case that's somewhere in script js that we want to refer to where does this div oh gosh okay and card element card errors card okay full name and the input for the name and that should be good you don't need a class okay go to price picker we're not going to do that enter your card details your subscription will start okay delete all that okay so total view now is set to zero zero zero um yeah i'm not gonna even add that feature yet payment view okay so we have two subscribe buttons or no that's not a button that's just a view okay i'm going to remove the css and the script tag and all these classes and all this stuff at the top all right all right simple super simple okay so the very first thing we need to do is we need to mount our card element here let's fire up an instance of stripe say give me the elements and refresh the page and we should now have a card element and we do looks great that'll work for us for now um okay so the whole point of this is that on the pay page when we get to the pay page i believe the point is that we can confirm this cl this client secret client side to complete setting up the subscription so on the payment i believe we want to say something like grab reference to this submit payment button and when it's clicked we want to make an api call to actually want to make a stripe.confirm card payment with the client secret from that subscription so do we need to retrieve the subscription and its latest invoices payment intents client secret i believe so and so we'll say client secret here payment method is going to be card and card element should work there we might also want billing details but whatever we'll start with start with this we need to fetch that client secret so i'm just going to say var client secret and let's see we have a way to get this oh right okay well config yeah i'm not even using config anymore click customer create the subscription and then we want to retrieve the subscriptions latest invoice um so this is going to retrieve the subscription and then it's going to retrieve the upcoming invoice for the customer that doesn't do what we want um subscription.retrieve ready and we need to expand also the um latest invoice payment intent and we just want to return that as json okay so then here i should be able to say fetch me the subscription um as i get with the subscription id in the query string params from our uh subscription id the subscription id embedded in the params okay all right so how does this work how's it look how does it feel we retrieve it and we get it then we console.log it let's see if it works so we refresh the page we should be making a fetch call to subscription and it's failing because we haven't restarted the server restart seeing this red one go by 500 parser error at slash subscription okay it's because it's not a post request it is um it is just a query yeah so how do we do sinatra restring not your query string params does that look like rams that you get back subscription now looks like it's still failing oh because we didn't restart restart again refresh yet another 500 expand what undefined method strip for array expand retrieve okay i think this might be one of these um an endpoint that works like so where the id and the expand request happen together so here we go okay so now we're getting back the query string or now we're getting back to subscription with the latest invoices payment intents stuff is expanded and we have the client secret there this is the client secret that we need to use to confirm the payment intent on the client's client side um so get yeah okay so assuming we got back our subscription and now we want to set client secret equal to subscription latest invoice dot payment intent client secret okay and then we want to use that client's okay so this this should work so if we have test um enter a test card number and then hit subscribe it should be confirming that payment intent and it looks like that succeeded we got back a succeeded payment intent so let's look at this subscription um stripe subscriptions retrieve that subscription and it's active awesome that is so cool all right so it's a three-step process number one you create the customer number two you create a subscription in an inactive state default inactive it's okay if the customer doesn't have any payment details and step three is you pay that payment intent on the client side and that activates the payment intent so again this is sort of just like um dog fooding and playing around with the payment this new payment flow if you would like to participate in the beta let me know you can hit me up on twitter at cgifdev and i would be happy to connect you with the billing team and would definitely absolutely love your feedback about this this process i'm going to go through it again here um yeah let's walk through it so we've got our sign up flow jenny.rosen2 example.com and we sign up click basic five dollars a month and that created a subscription we should probably redirect after that let's do that so then okay so on the prices page after we create a subscription we are going to window.location equals a.html subscription id equals ada.id i think it came back yeah came back as just a subscription okay so let's start this again back fresh ar at example.com sign up select creates a subscription we're redirected to pay.html that pay.html pay that html oh question mark okay yeah sure cool uh this is this should be a question mark that's a query string um all right let's do it again there are two at example.com select pay.com you enter an sca card subscribe oh cool we got our challenge complete authentication and we should be good to go cool um then maybe after we subscribe we uh we actually like show ben function result um if result.er we want to alert our result i err message else we should alert like subscribed okay one more time for those in the back basic s card number subscribe get our 3d secure modal subscribed cool all right so that's kind of the new flow um and it feels pretty nice it feels really nice so yeah that is that thanks for joining thanks for watching again this isn't beta uh please let me know if you want to participate please don't use this code yet um as it is uh yeah it's still in still in beta so won't necessarily work so that's it thanks for joining folks thanks for hanging out we'll see you next time --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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