---
title: Dev Chats - Accepting recurring payments for your SaaS business with Checkout
slug: dev-chats-accepting-recurring-payments-for-your-saas-business-with-checkout
published_at: 2022-09-15 10:02:57 +0000
updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:13:02 +0000
summary: 
description: If you're running a business that collects recurring payments with subscriptions, there are so many things you need to consider. What payment methods do you accept, localized prices, issuing receipts, funds, and much more.
 
 In this live session, we'll have fellow Stripes Josh Ackerman and CJ Avilla join Cecil Phillip to showcase some of the ways that Stripe is supporting SaaS companies. They will discuss some of the newly released features that support SaaS business models, and we'll also see some demos of how these features work together.
tags: []
views: 178
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/dev-chats-accepting-recurring-payments-for-your-saas-business-with-checkout
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMfRjmm1zws
youtube_id: BMfRjmm1zws
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/BMfRjmm1zws
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BMfRjmm1zws/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# Dev Chats - Accepting recurring payments for your SaaS business with Checkout

*Published: September 15, 2022*
*Views: 178*

## Watch

[Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMfRjmm1zws)

[![Dev Chats - Accepting recurring payments for your SaaS business with Checkout](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BMfRjmm1zws/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMfRjmm1zws)

## Description

If you're running a business that collects recurring payments with subscriptions, there are so many things you need to consider. What payment methods do you accept, localized prices, issuing receipts, funds, and much more.

In this live session, we'll have fellow Stripes Josh Ackerman and CJ Avilla join Cecil Phillip to showcase some of the ways that Stripe is supporting SaaS companies. They will discuss some of the newly released features that support SaaS business models, and we'll also see some demos of how these features work together.

## Transcript

[Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] hi everyone welcome to another stripe Dev chats my name is salsa Philip and I'm going to be your host today if this is the first time that you've been in Dev chats before well what we usually do is talk about a lot of the cool and amazing things that are happening in the world of stripe so definitely welcome glad you could be here and hope you come around for like some more of the other ones that we plan to have in the future now this month particularly is pretty special because what we're doing is we're taking the entire month that we're focusing on one of our products called checkout and in my opinion and you know it's just my opinion but checkout is one of the most easiest ways for you to get started accepting payments in stripe um you know I know I've used it in a couple of my apps and demos and I know everyone loves it so much so what we're going to do today is I have my friends here CJ and Josh and they're going to tell us a little bit about like what checkout is how does it work and we can see some examples of how you know you can add it to your application but in particularly too there's some features here for SAS Founders if you're working on SAS business or a company there's some interesting features here that you might want to pay attention to but before we dive into like what we're going to talk about what do we do around the introductions and we can kind of just you know get to know everybody and see what's going on so CJ you've been on the show before but you know for kicks and Giggles why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone let them know who you are and what do you do yeah hey friends I'm CJ I'm developer advocate here at stripe and I work on tons of video and demos to help you integrate stripe so that you can accept payments or make payouts or generally manage your business online I'm super excited to be here with uh Josh and Cecil today so uh thanks again for having us back on for sure and if you're subscribed to us on our stripe developer YouTube channel you'll probably thumb scroll through and you'll see CJ's faces on like half of the videos so um yeah definitely appreciate CJ making it time to come over here and hang out with us today uh Josh why don't you introduce yourself today for sure thanks so much for having me on my name is Josh and I'm a product lead I focus on our different checkout products and I primarily Focus my time working on stripe checkout which is the product that we'll talk about today I'm devoting my time at stripe to figuring out ways to unlock potential for merchants of all different segments but especially for SAS Founders and we spend a lot of time on the checkout team building the easiest and most powerful way for you to get started with stripe so really excited to dig into that with all of you today awesome well Josh again I'm really glad that you can make it with us um before we dive like really deep into like the topic um I'm gonna pull up my screen and I want to share like a couple of resources that I thought like people might be interested in learning about and hearing about um first off Shameless plug like I mentioned like this is checkout month right so we have not just today but we have a entire month where every week on every Wednesday we're going to be having like different guests you know people that are starting companies we're gonna have um uh program managers and developers and like tons of amazing folks open source folks all everyone that uses checkout kind of sharing their experience from more of a developer perspective so if you're interested in seeing like what are some of the other upcoming events that we have um you can check out the link that's showing uh right now in the bottom of your screen and then you can see like you know some of the guests that we have planned to come on and some of the other ones we have planned for the rest of the month so again really hope that you could you know come out and spend some time with us and learn about you know stripe checkout now the next one I want to share with you all again if you're on our stripe developer YouTube channel um we actually have a really cool playlist that CJ develops so obviously I'm glad CJ is here he can talk to you all about about it for a little bit but it's called fundamentals of SAS right and again it goes through talking to us about like again as a SAS developer or as a SAS company what are some of the things that I might be interested about particularly when it comes to like the stripe catalog to help me take my business to the next level and CJ maybe you could give us like a quick like elevator picture about like what can folks expect when they take a look at these videos yeah so the fundamentals of SAS will take you from zero to having a fully functioning software as a service business with subscriptions we're building with Ruby on Rails in that series and we use the page M which is a really powerful engine that one of our community experts has built but something that I am really excited to share as part of the SAS fundamentals is a lot of thinking about about modeling your business and thinking about how you can you know actually unlock value for your subscription customers in order to maybe like optimize your Revenue by providing annual prices in addition to monthly prices and making sure that you're actually like creating those products and prices inside of stripe so that they play nicely with things like checkout and the pricing table and the customer portal and all these different components so there's a lot of tips and tricks it's really jam-packed we talk about things like test clocks and lots and lots of different features so it is a little bit more in-depth than what you might find if you were to just go through a single guide in the docs and so yeah really excited to share that and hopefully find it uh useful so well you don't have more episodes coming out soon so yeah we're up to episode five now oh that's awesome like I love when you do videos like these because kind of like what you said like they they augment the docs right like they add that additional context and then it there's nothing like seeing someone do something versus me just reading it right so now I have like both resources and I'm I'm guessing too we probably have like some code that's in there as well that folks could take a look at and play around with so now I could read the thing I could watch the videos I could play around with the code and I can get a very general experience about like what it actually feels like to like use some of these products yeah exactly at the end there's there's links to the repos if you want to head over and download those you can start from where the videos left off and build your actual your business without having to worry about uh implementing any of that so nice all right we're gonna go on to the next one super quick so again in addition to those videos CJ again right like has a series of blog posts so if you head over to dev.2 stripe you know under under dev.2 stripe we have a I guess we call like an organization or Community or whatever you're calling on them that's who we have a section for us where we create a lot of blog posts and CJ has a series here where he does talk about again some of those things that as SAS Founders and SAS companies like some of the things that we should be thinking about so you know if you click on one of the um the blog posts you can see here like it will link you to the other ones if you look at the top and again you can see like tons of you know he's up to eight blog posts now I think he's trying to go for a record he might hit 10 by the end of the month we don't know we'll see what happens we'll see what happens but again this is a great series if you're again interested in learning about that um and last link really quickly I want to share with you um so our friends over at engine um so you know they're uh they're I like to call them like friends do we lose Cecil what I'm here oh no I'm here what happened okay you cut out for a second I'm like what happened oh we're back okay okay I'm sorry I don't know what happened well I'm still here um so yeah so our friends here at engine uh you know they have this really interesting video talking about how you could use stripe a metered billing to like help monetize your apis so imagine like you you know similar to stripe you might be like an API company who sells like a service and maybe you sell your service I don't know like so many calls per month or so many calls per day or per minute like whatever your cycle is you know you can use some of uh you know some of the the tools that we have to help you build your customers right and so there's a really interesting video here where they talk about how they can do that with Azure API management and Stripes so definitely hope that you all check this out um I'm gonna post all the links to the videos inside the chat and we're gonna try and get them in the description as well so if you're watching this video later make sure you check out the description and if you're watching us live they'll be inside of the comment section in the chat section as well now enough of that not for me this is the part where I always say like this is no longer the Sasha show right this is the checkout show so let's let's talk about checkout and and Josh again as the PM for the product what is like why don't you tell us a little bit about like about checkout and like what are some of the things that your team is really focusing on to make sure that people and developers and companies have a really good experience when they're starting to accept payments absolutely for a quick introduction we think that stripe checkout will be the easiest and the most powerful way for ambitious businesses to accept payments and when we're building checkout we're primarily thinking about this on two different axes the first is we really want Founders and Engineers who are integrating checkout to get more time if you can integrate checkout and free up your time and your mind space so that you don't have to focus on building payment flows but instead you can focus on building and differentiating your own products and services we consider that to be a really big win the second thing that I want to acknowledge is that we're building checkout so that you can actually make more money we've seen that folks that come to stripe and choose checkout as their product offering to accept payments they end up converting more buyers they end up getting a higher average order value and we even see higher lifetime values for customers when Merchants choose checkout and so we're doing this by building you know the most powerful parts of stripe directly into our checkout product nice and so CJ I know you also have some experience for checkouts here right like I love checkout checkout is such an amazing product it's like yeah I mean it takes away so much of the code that you would otherwise have to write with your own custom form so you've really got like a couple of different options when you want to accept payment let's start with the easiest first and that would be this no code option where you can share a payment link so you can go directly to the stripe dashboard it takes five seconds you can create a payment link share that out anywhere you want and what's awesome is that's powered by checkout under the hood so even this no code option is actually checkout uh and then if you want to sort of graduate to one level higher and write just maybe a little bit of code then you can Implement stripe checkout which again is is really really straightforward and is getting easier to integrate every single day in fact like I feel like every time I turn around I'm taking away arguments on my API call to actually like enable features which is amazing um and you know in the early days you would create a checkout session on the server and then return its ID to the client and you had to do a little bit of JavaScript a little bit of server but now you can you can make an API call on the server to get back a checkout session and redirect to its URL and there you are in checkout with tons and tons of functionality and power um so it is it is Rock Solid but one of the messages that I want to make sure that you're hearing at home is that stripe checkout is not just for one-time payments stripe checkout can be used to collect recurring payments so you can set up subscriptions and actually um what's what's amazing is that even with the no code option with payment links you can also start subscriptions so you can just from the stripe dashboard create a payment link and share that out to start a subscription and what what I wanted to show really quick um so on on one of those blog posts oh sure I could bring my screen back up yeah oh no yeah yeah so I got those blog posts um I can't remember which part it is in the series or whatever but um I talk about how you might build a a pricing table so building a pricing page with products and prices to show something like this and with the new embeddable pricing table even on dev.2 which is this this blog platform where we posted this blog I was able to embed a code pen right right here where my products and prices are being fetched from Stripes I can just go and stripe and change these products and prices and now you can click on the buttons directly in dev2 and be redirected through the checkout flow and all of this is powered by checkout under the hood so um yeah it's it's an amazing product I'm really really happy that I get to use it and talk about it and build with it because it is so powerful um okay so I I've got a couple demos but I would love to hear if we could start maybe like um if we rewind the clock just a little bit before we launch this new trial thing if Josh like I would love to hear your take because I definitely heard from users this asks so maybe yeah if you could speak to just uh uh maybe kind of like what you were hearing about trials relative to subscriptions when you were talking with users um yeah that would be helpful for sure even taking a step back and coming to one of the things that you shared a moment ago CJ one of the things that we are always thinking about is how we at stripe can write code so that millions of merchants can then you know get that functionality instantly if not overnight and begin to leverage brand new functionality from us without having to actually make code changes or in some cases by getting to delete code that they've already written you see us doing this time and time again when it comes to different customization options that we're packing into the checkout page and different features and functionality as well for example we had many many businesses that were reaching out to us and saying we want opportunities to upsell or cross-sell different products on our checkout page this is functionality that we built in we heard from different businesses that they wanted the ability to Showcase uh different payment methods to buyers all around the world so we ended up localizing Checkout in more than 25 different languages we have more than 20 different payment methods and a bunch of different Express checkout options as well so it's these kinds of features and functionality that you'll now get for free if you choose checkout and one of those features to bridge into what CJ was referencing is we heard from many different Merchants especially recurring SAS Merchants that they wanted the ability to create trials for their customers and historically we've allowed our businesses on stripe to create trials and to collect payment details from their customers this works today with stripe checkout out of the box and one of the other flows that we wanted to enable was the ability for businesses to actually kick off a trial via stripe checkout and then collect those payment instrument details at a later date now I want to take a step back and emphasize that the reason why we can build this functionality into stripe checkout and bring it to you so seamlessly is because when you choose stripe checkout and we when you get started with stripe you're also getting a ton of other products under the hood and one of those products that CJ referenced earlier is stripe billing and so the combination here will now allow us to bring to you the ability to kick off trials via stripe checkout for recurring subscriptions and you can get to choose whether as part of that trial creation you either collect payment instrument details up front or you collect them at a later date and so with that CJ do you want to take us through a quick demo of what that can look like totally let's do it yeah so uh let's see so we've got um I've got the striped seal I installed so I can say stripe samples create one of the samples we have is called check out single uh subscription that's one of my favorites obviously it's uh the demo for starting a single subscription we'll use Ruby today on the server and we're gonna CD into that new directory that was just created for us now in the root of this project we added a new thing called a sample seed.json so let's open that up really quick this is a fixture that you can use with the stripe CLI that will automatically create the products and prices for you that work and play nicely with this specific demo so if I go to my stripe dashboard and I look at my products right now I don't uh you'll notice that the top one says donation but if I say stripe fixtures sample seed got Json that is going to create a starter product a monthly price for that product and an annual price a pro product with monthly and annual prices and if I refresh my stripe dashboard here I'm going to see some starter and professional products here and they've already got sort of like a bunch of stuff set up for me so that's kind of like a jump start tool that you can use with this sample if we jump into the demo you'll see there's a client and server directory the client very simple just a little bit of HTML some JavaScript for display and the server it's got this dot end file for managing our environment variables our API keys and we have server.rb a little Sinatra app for running the server so in the dot end file I'm actually going to set my price IDs from the stripe dashboard that were just created as part of that fixture so I'm going to grab my Pro price here and drop that in and now what we can do is look at the server so if we jump into the server here you'll notice there's a bunch of routes that are already sort of pre-configured for you one of them is slash config and this is going to render back our publishable key and also a basic and Pro price and then we have this route here that accepts post requests and we'll make an API call to create checkout sessions here is the place where we're actually making our API call to stripe and we're passing along a couple of table Stakes things that we always need with checkout sessions that is a success URL cancel URL this is the success URL is where the customer will be redirected after the customer has successfully paid cancel URL is if they choose to hit the back button and sort of bail out of the process they don't want to actually subscribe they'll be redirected there we're setting the mode here to subscription because we want to collect a subscription you can enable automatic taxes by doing this and we have some line items that are going to pass along our quantity and a price we'll just leave it as is for now we'll start up the server um actually got a CD into the server directory bundle install any of those dependencies and then we can say Ruby server to start it up and if we jump into the server here or like the actual um demo which is now running at localhost 4242 this is the sample so now we can see we have the choice of starting with a starter or professional this demo is not using the pricing table so we're actually just sort of like hard coding products and prices here and if we walk through the the checkout flow right now this is sort of the default that you would experience and see so already from uh you know like one minute of installing a sample creating products and prices were up and running and we have like a a product that we can charge 12 a month for um pretty pretty awesome so what we want to do like the end goal here is that we actually want to start a trial and we don't want to have or like require the user to enter all of these details for their card information or their Bank Account Details because uh oftentimes we hear that conversion might be a little higher into trial if there's no card up front or no payment details up front so what we can do is now we can jump into that server file and where we're making the API call to create the checkout session we can pass a couple of new arguments here so subscription data is a a sub hash that we can pass and anytime you see this underscore data on a property or on an argument to the API that means that we're going to be creating subordinate objects so this is the data that's going to be passed down when we when checkout ultimately creates that underlying subscription object subscription is the Primitive that we don't actually have to worry about or deal with very much because Drive checkout is handling all of that for us but one thing we want to do is we want to specify that the subscription should have a trial period that is uh maybe 14 days long so just by doing that that is going to enable a subscription uh trial now in addition to passing trial period days of 14 we can also now say payment method collection and pass it the string value if of if required we only need to collect payment method if it's required so let's go back through the flow I think I need to restart my server here all right localhost 4242 and we're back in the flow let's use the professional price this time and now we see we get 14 days free then 18 per month after and we can enter in an email address here and say that we want to start the trial what's amazing is that before we have before we got access to this new starting uh subscriptions on trial without payment method up front we would ask users to go and implement this themselves so basically this was kind of like all on you to go and figure out how you wanted to deal with free trials and maintaining you know two lists essentially of your customers that are on a trial versus your customers that have their uh their subscriptions set up inside of stripe but now you can do it all directly through one interface and that is just send everyone through stripe checkout and it's just going to work now what's really cool about this demo is we have this manage billing button at the bottom and the customer portal is where you would send customers anytime during that trial or when the trial expires as soon as you want them to add a payment method type it is our recommendation that this is where you you're going to send those customers um I'm going to pause there for a second and see if there's anything to add I'm like so so pumped about this and I want to also talk about the no code portal so let's uh yeah curious if there's uh there's any questions in the chat CJ I I don't know what you had for breakfast this morning but I feel like your energy level is like through the roof right now I appreciate it it's great no it's great this is this is such it's such a fun product to build with and I feel like um you as developers out there can go out and start making money online so simply now I mean you otherwise would have had to build so many things and you're like localizing in all these different languages and supporting ACH and credit there's just so much to build and the fact that you have access to this with just a couple API calls and redirects is just um it's awesome and it's so fun to build with so yeah I do agree with you I do think it's awesome and I'm sure a lot of folks in the chat as well like agree with you now here's our friend Emily coming in from YouTube and Emily's saying you know gives us their confidence to integrate something as intimidating as payments and I think I think that's a sense of matured by a lot of developers right like when you think about payments like that's not a trivial feature to add to your application right like there's a lot that happens behind the scenes and you think about security you think about charging people to your right amounts and how do I handle refunds and how do I handle like different locales and different payment methods and and and and and right like there's so many complex systems that happen in the back end and so for us to have something like stripe checkout I think is amazing because again like you said like it's like code optional right like I don't have to write code but I can and but either way is like a it's like a very um it's a very welcoming path right like it's a very accessible path for me to kind of go into my app um interestingly enough like last week when we had our first video our first stream for checkout month um ranzu um ranzu from the UK um who's our guest he said you know he uses checkout in so many of our products and his one complaints I'm gonna tell you the bad things is one complaint was he wish we would have launched it sooner I did not pay him to say that like I did not he said that himself he's like the only thing that he wished was that we launched it sooner because again it just kind of makes sense you know what I mean so yeah I I think we're all CJ we're all with you with like how excited okay the product I think is amazing amazing yeah the one other thing that I would emphasize is that you know as CJ goes through this demo and um showcases each of these different components of the payment acceptance process and recurring billing process we're always thinking about more and more ways that we can take some of that overhead off of your shoulders so that we can worry about the payments parts we can worry about optimizing for conversion and making sure you get to that highest aov possible so that you can really focus on building your core product and so I would just encourage you to also start a dialogue with stripe if there are moments in your flow where you don't maybe want to actually be writing this code and maybe this is a flow that many other merchants or many of their businesses um in your line of work are actually creating maybe that's something that we can build for you and take off of your plate and so feel free to reach out to us if there are other products on top of or adjacent to check out and the billing customer portal that maybe we could build into stripe yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and so kind of like what Josh is saying um you know you could look under his lower third there and you could see like you know there's his Twitter handle there's CJ's Twitter handle you know we can also tweet us at um at striped underscore Devon on Twitter um there's a lot of different ways to reach out to the team um you know so please would love to hear from you and hear what your thoughts are any suggestions your successes your failures everything so we can always just make the best possible products okay absolutely CJ what else you got for us okay so I mean we could we could I could do this for for hours and hours and hours half an hour okay so I'm gonna speed through this so I want to add a payment method here actually let's before we add a payment method what I wanted to talk about was you know when someone starts a trial that's going to last 14 days it can be challenging to think about okay what am I how am I gonna build my uh my automations and my web hook logic that's gonna you know maybe provision access or de-provision access for someone based on their trial ending and so there is this really handy feature of the API called a test clock and I wanted to share that to you really quick this is a this is another sort of like bonus round thing so uh before we create our checkout session one of the things that we can pass in uh when we're creating the checkout session is reference to an existing stripe customer so what we could do is before we uh before we actually create our checkout session we could say um you know customer is stripe customer dot create and then we could pass in its ID under the customer argument here by saying customer.id that's how we can associate a checkout session with an existing customer now you might imagine this customer is created during the sign up flow or in some other part of your application and you're going to store off that stripe customer ID alongside your authenticated user for the demo I'm just going to hit the API right here create a customer and we're going to use that customer's ID when we create the checkout session now this is where it gets a little fancy because we're going to create a test clock and a test clock is going to allow us to simulate moving through time it's really cool so we're going to say test helpers uh test clock dot create and a test clock expects that we pass in at least a frozen time and that's going to be time.now and we're going to pass in this is going to be a Unix timestamp that we're passing in to create that test block and then when we create the customer we're going to associate that brand new customer with a test clock so we're going to say this test clock is going to be test clock dot ID and now the subscription that results when we finally go through the checkout flow is going to be also associated with this test clock so any events that are going to fire those web hook events that are going to fire related to that subscription will be able to simulate by moving our test clock forward so let's say we start the trial today and it's a 14 day free trial we can then take that test clock Advance it 15 days and look at all the web hooks that are going to fire on our account so let's let's just do that okay so right here we have our our test clock I think that all should work and fire up okay so going to restart my server we're going to head back over to localhost 4242 and now when we say yeah redirect me back to stripe checkout one of the things that we'll see is that we should have some a new test clock created for a specific customer so now if we enter in maybe test at example.com and hey and say start trial once that subscription is created we can head over to the dashboard and look at our customers and you'll see this test customer at the very top here has this special orange clock next to their name so if we drill into that customer you'll see that there's this huge banner across the top this is uh and it's in a clock simulation it's pinned to this specific time that's because this is the time that we froze the test clock app so we can see that the starter subscription right now it says that the trial is going to end on September 28th but what we can do is we can say we want to advance time so join me in our time machine we're going to like go on a little trip here and say we want to let's just jump directly to the end of the month so we're going to advance time to the end of the month but before we do so what I want to do is start logging out the events that are firing so we have a sense of what's happening on our stripe account so we can say stripe listen dash dash forward to localhost 4242 webhook now this is going to form a direct connection between stripe and our local running server it's going to forward events that are happening on our stripe account to our local server so we can build automations around those we haven't implemented any automations yet but in the logs for this listen command we'll be able to see the different events that are firing so let's Advance time to September 30 and Chris Oliver is hopping in the time machine with us so uh all right let's let's go here we go here we go Okay so we've got test helper test clock advancing this is the first event that we see now we see there's an upcoming invoice and then we see that the customer subscriptions trial will end so this is the event this is like a very special event that tells us this the trial is going to end and if the customer doesn't already have a payment method on file then we want to make sure that we're converting them to paying customers and so what we can do is we can grab that event type jump back over to our server head down to our web hook Handler and we can add a new check here for this specific event types we can say if the event type is equal to this trial will end event then we want to print out like okay send and email you know in practice we would actually send them an email send an email to the customer with a link to the portal what's really neat is that instead of having to come up with a unique customer portal address for every single customer now if we go to the settings and under the billing section there's this customer portal section we scroll all the way down to the bottom there's this brand new no code customer portal if you don't see a link here there's going to be a button to generate a link we're going to copy that and this is a no code way for people to go and manage their billing all right so uh we will restart our server to get that new web hook logic going and so I gotta I gotta so wanna I gotta I think that's cool but I know I gotta try and I try I gotta try and get in as you're showing us all the amazing stuff yes yes so you copy that link yeah what if I'm writing an application and I region like do I have to copy that link every time I'm putting in my code or is it like an API if I wanted to write code is there API that I could call to get like that link yeah so actually like the the typical way and uh until very recently this is like brand new this no code portal is brand new but until we release the no code portal you would have to make another separate API call to create a billing portal session and redirect customers the same way you would with stripe checkout yeah so very similar API where you pass in the customer's ID and then you get back a session that has a URL on it you could redirect to that URL okay that makes sense yeah so this is this is really neat because this will uh send emails and use like magic link authentication in order to work with uh with your your payment flows so um yeah the this button here in the demo so if you install the checkout single subscription demo then when you click on this manage billing uh button that's going to make the post request to the server that's going to use the API to redirect so if you're if you're curious about the code for that you can head over to the sample and take a look at the the code that's here um so what I love about this is that like you're showing us both options right you're showing it as a developer I could choose again to write code or not to write code like I can go into the portal I could copy some links and I could you know have like that payment experience customized to the way that makes sense for my business or I could write some code and I can customize it that way but either way we have the option to choose what path we go on as we're using stripe checkout exactly exactly so I uh I entered in a a new customer that went through the flow we've got a simulation here we're going to jump to the end of the month I'm going to advance I love how we're just like jumping through time and we're looking at it like it's normal this is normal through a time right now it's so fun right like I think this is this is also um yeah I mean just there is a sort of in the test driven development industry there are a lot of tools for simulating different time scenarios when you're trying to test time-driven things but this is the first time in my experience that I've ever seen this done with an API and it makes it really really fun to test and build against web hooks which are all of these events that are going to fire in the future that you would otherwise have to actually wait like 14 days to get this event and then hope that you actually caught it and maybe you had an error you got to wait 14 more days um so we're going to click on that link that brings us to the no code portal so this is the actual no code portal I'm going to enter an email here um don't spam this email but uh okay so now we wait for a couple seconds and so I'm guessing what's gonna happen now in the back end stripe is going to obviously shoot on an email it's going to go to your account you're going to get some code and then you know on your phone or your okay go right you can't actually yes you got a code but then now again like for security purposes right like he gets a validation token or a validation code gonna put it in here and then now you're going to get redirected to the portal right there we go that's right yeah so this is all again like you could totally combine you know pricing table plus the custom no code customer portal and have a fully functional SAS application you can combine a just a payment link that is a subscription-based payment link and you would have a full uh full functionality here one question I have for Josh is now that we have support for these kinds of features uh natively in checkout how quickly do those land inside of the other tools so you know the pricing table I don't actually know is this available the trial like uh you know starting a trial without payment details is that part of pricing table yet is it part of payment links yet how does that all sort of Upstream totally you'll see when we launch new products and features both upstream and downstream of checkout that we try and bring as many features as we possibly can to them as soon as they launch to GA for everyone to start using and and you'll see all the details about these products in our dogs the thing that I want to emphasize is that sometimes we get requests to bring additional straight functionality to these features or even to build brand new functionality that doesn't yet exist and so we're constantly iterating on these products and bringing new features to them I'm going to give you a quick example of both and this is an early preview of what's to come with our product roadmap which is on the pricing table side that CJ has mentioned we launched the pricing table just a few months ago and it's got an incredible reception and we're seeing the vast majority of new Founders who are coming to stripe starting SAS businesses or actually using pricing table to get started which is really exciting um but there are actually two big things that we're missing from pricing table that are soon going to launch the first being the ability to leverage um the ability to leverage a custom CTA so if you want to send your customer to maybe a contact us form for a sales process that's going to be coming to pricing table in addition the stripe billing logic encompasses a tremendous amount of uh information in regards to tiered pricing and we're going to bring all of that to pricing table too and so we're just trying to make sure that regardless of what your business model is the stripe products will serve your needs really well and by the way if there's ever a use case or need that maybe we don't perfectly serve please reach out to us whether it's via Discord Twitter Etc and we'd love to um to support your use cases quickly as we can nice super cool I I think every time I turn around checkout is like adding new stuff shipping new things it is really really hard to keep up so uh I think yes one thing that I missed that launched without my without my knowing was support for metered billing inside of stripe checkout so I want to change gears a little bit we saw how you can set up a subscription without a trial but I built this little demo here it's called hypebot it's actually really really fun so I wanted to run through it just very quickly so the way that it works is you connect your YouTube account and you can view the videos that you've posted uh on your YouTube account so we've got like tons and tons of videos here uh I don't know like some of these are not live yet so they're not going to work so here we go postgres in rails with enums okay so what this tool does is it allows you to automatically generate tweets based on the transcript of the video so it uses the YouTube API to pull in your transcripts and then it uses open AI to automatically generate tweets for you so you kind of like have to uh just I'm going to edit like the script a little bit so that I don't get charged too much but what happens is every single time you use openai you have to pay a little bit of money so I'm going to update the transcript here and say think of a tweet so now uh this is going to go off to open Ai and it just thought of this tweet so a new episode of rails event data is up we're going to learn a ton about enums in some recent releases blah blah blah it's like a way to help promote your videos and so as you're going through and using this application and we're sort of like passing a bunch of data to open Ai and then open AI is returning some responses every time we use openai we have to spend a little bit of money so it's going to cost sort of like fractions of a dollar every every time we send a token which it might be a word or it might be you know some parts of a word or whatever and so in order to have um to charge and to align the value that you're you're getting as a customer with the amount that you have to pay what you can do is build out a pricing model that might be something like this where you have a fixed twenty dollar a month flat fee plus some number of cents per thousand token so this is actually like a pretty Advanced business model right and uh so I was actually surprised to know or like to to learn that you can do this directly with stripe checkout so here again we're going through the checkout flow and we can see that we have uh you know our fixed 20 amount that we're going to be charged and then it says price varies and you're going to be charged seven cents for every thousand so we can go through the Subscribe flow and that's going to create a brand new subscription for us that will have subscription items now when you have a subscription that has two line items like that one of them is going to have um or like the resulting subscription is going to have two subscription items on it one of them will be for that fixed price that is um the the term that we use inside of uh the the API is licensed so you're gonna have a price that's licensed and then you're gonna have another price that's metered and that metered price is the one that we're going to use for uh in order to report the usage records so every time someone goes and makes one of those generates one of those tweets using open AI we're actually going to report a usage record and so this is the API call that we're going to use to send stripe the subscription item that's the metered subscription item on the subscription and then we're going to pass a little bit of data about how much uh how many things they use so this might be minutes that they used uh inside of their hosting platform like hatchbox which is uh Chris Oliver's Tool uh and I know that Chris Oliver just started um using some metered billing stuff too so if you have any feedback we would love to hear that I don't actually know if you're using checkout though for that so uh either way let us know so here what we're doing is the suggestion that's kind of like the generated uh data that we're getting back from open AI That's going to have a number on it that says how many tokens did it actually did we spend while trying to generate that tweet and we can use that as the quantity that we're sending to stripe so what's really cool is if we go to the stripe dashboard here I've got to switch up to this other stripe account and if we look at the top customer here you can see uh I've generated quite a few of these but if we look at uh yeah let's look at this one here you'll see that the usage records are being reported and you can view their usage directly here in the stripe dashboard you can tell how many units were used and because we used you know um uh because we used 291 of 1000 it's rounding up to seven cents so this is really really cool stuff again all of this supports uh or is is uh supported by the customer portal now the customer portal doesn't have the ability to look and see exactly you know this is how many usage records but inside of the customer portal you can look at your invoices so here we might scroll down and say like okay this is uh you know hypot Studio standard and um we're spending some amount of tokens on uh on our usage every time that we're generating um generating those tweets very cool stuff I just wanted to basically I wanted to show that we can walk through that entire flow with the usage and Report usage records and that subscription is fully created uh with stripe checkout so uh really fun stuff also one thing I wanted to note before we before we come to a close here was that we have some new content coming that's going to show you how to use sub uh stripe checkout to start a subscription and then a little bit more advanced use cases with subscription schedules so that you can build some really Advanced things like um uh installment plans where someone pays a certain amount each month for a fixed number of months and so uh we're also going to show how to upgrade at the end of the cycle or downgrade at the end of the cycle these are all things that you can do with subscription schedules attached to those subscriptions that are created with strike checkout so that's that's like the two demos that I've got for us today thanks yeah thanks a ton for letting me know I feel like my mind has just been blown like I'm gonna have to re-watch this video and like take notes and try and remember like all of the different things that you've shown us um but that was amazing man like definitely thank you for showing us that um particularly the test clock ones yeah interesting for me because again it's not something that we see a lot of the time it's not something that you often see oh wow like I need to test this subscription like how can I go forward and backward in time right like how can we control some of these things so I definitely I definitely think that was really really cool for us to see and obviously too with like the being able to manage my subscription and and seeing some of those options with how I can have like a base price and then like like you said like a per thousand I'm gonna charge you this much right and then now we'll have stripe handling like that calculation and that math for me because you know developers were lazy right like we don't want to do math we just wanna we just write a white code and like kind of like get to it right so I think that was pretty cool um so Josh for you like so now we've seen all these really cool things about checkout I guess what I'd really love to know is maybe for the next couple of months or weeks or you know your next cycle like what are some of the things that you're thinking about um or what some of the things that the team is thinking about in terms of new features and a road map and and just you know like just different types of support that um you're gonna add to checkout for sure I think there are two really big themes that we think about when we're considering improving checkout the first is improving customers customization so what are ways that we can make checkout feel even more native regardless of what business you you're using we want the checkout experience to feel super seamless for all of your customers and so we're really focused on each of those different kinds of customization options and you've probably seen us invest in this over the course of the past few months in launching custom fonts Cuts custom buttons Uh custom colors custom domains were all about the customization the second thing that we're really building is a lot that will fit your use case so for example for SAS Merchants we're building features and functionality specific to the SAS use case for e-commerce Merchants we're building features and functionality specific to the e-commerce use case and so if there are features that we can build to take some of the weight off your shoulders please let us know yeah one of the things I often think about I'm sure you do as well is like how like what happens when my business starts to scale right like what happens when I start to reach out to different audiences not just more audiences in the same place but in also different locales right like I might have a company here in Florida right and I want to reach out and go to Canada and I want to go to South America and I want to go to the UK right like how how does checkout help me do some of those type of things like in terms of I don't know just supporting different payment methods and supporting different types of currencies and and even like I don't know maybe I need my form to be in Spanish like like how can I do some of that scaling without again like having to write code right and having to know a lot about like the engine that's behind stripe checkout totally so the great news here is that stripe is live today and supports businesses running in 47 different countries but the reality is that y'all have you'll y'all probably have buyers that are all over the world and so our goal was to make it as easy as possible to ensure that we support all of those buyers regardless of where they're located we do this through a combination of different ways way number one is we support over 135 different currencies so all of those currencies can be enabled via stripe so that you can sell your products to your customers in their local currency the second thing that we do is we offer localization so when I think about localization not just in terms of currency we're also thinking about this in terms of the language so checkout is actually in over 30 different languages the second thing we do is we have different payment methods so check out supports over 20 different payment methods so that your customers regardless of where they're located they have a payment option that is native to what they use in their country here in the US we're obviously really familiar with cards whether they be debit cards credit cards and some Express checkout options like Apple pay and Google pay but as soon as you take one step outside the US there are so many different options that we can provide that you know aren't necessarily as common here one last thing I'll mention is that we're also focused on different payment methods that are deeply related to specific business models so for example we're focused on Bank transfers like ACH for SAS businesses because we know that that's a really common way that you all accept payments for SAS functionality yeah that makes a lot of sense and you know I can imagine anyone that's building a business right like as I make a choice on a technology decision like I'm hoping like that decision is going to grow with me which again if I build my stuff on Rubio I write it with node or dot net in 10 years I'm not expecting to rewrite that application right like what I'm I'm expecting to add to it and I'm expecting it to expand with me just like if I select like an authorization provider just like if I you know accept like a a payments on a billing provider right I'm not going to expect to get rid of it later but then as I'm moving on to some of these other companies and I'm I'm expanding some of these other countries I'm sorry not companies but other countries I'm thinking okay are the choices that I'm making in terms of like hosting models and payments and Technology stack and localization like are these things going to grow with me and again as I think about stripe again it's it's a piece of my puzzle right but it's also a piece that I I want to rely on the experts to like help me make the right choices and I kind of feel like again with checkout I could write a little bit less code and still have the company make the right choice for me like still have strike make the right choice for me again localization and you know PCI you know compliance like all of these different types of things that like I'm just like I don't wanna I don't want to touch that stuff right we just want to take that off all that stuff off your shoulders and we really think about this in two different dimensions the first is that once you have a successful business on stripe we want that business to grow and we're going to create all the features and functionality that we can pack into stripe checkout and even upstream and downstream of checkout so that your existing business can grow and can scale and you can make the most of every customer interaction the second thing that I want to emphasize that CJ really uh showcased today in his demos is that look your business is probably going to evolve too over the course of the coming years and maybe you're going to expand into selling different products trying different business models figuring out what works as you're on the journey to get to product Market fit and hopefully CJ's demo today really emphasized the flexibility of checkout so that you can have the option to define a new business model try going to Market with it and see how how sticky it gets yeah so again so again that was great again CJ Josh thank you all so much for coming on um we have a couple minutes left and just before we cut off I was just wondering are there any like final thoughts anything that you know like what would you love for us to do now now that we've seen all this stuff obviously you want us to use a product but like like where are some of the places do you want us to go you know are there docs coming up do you all have events coming up that we should pay attention to are there any special betas that we could get into preview betas beforehand like like tell us like how can we get more involved with what's happening with stripe checkup totally if you go to stripe.com checkout um you'll actually see that there is you can obviously click Start now you can jump right into our docs you can create a stripe account one other thing that I want to reference though is you'll also see right there front and center is you'll have the option to try our demo with the stripe checkout demo you'll actually be able to set up what your checkout flow would look like you can turn on and off features and functionality right there on in the in the checkout demo without having to even write any code or create a stripe account that is so helpful in being able to visualize all the functionality that's embedded within checkout and so I'd really encourage all of you to play around with this and give it a try before even jumping in and creating your stripe account nice and then I know you'll also have the um the the pre-built checkout page like the quick starts and I think with the quick starts what I love about them too is that they kind of allow me to get started and try this stuff out but then it generates code for me which I think is absolutely amazing because again like the best code is the code that I don't have to write right and 100 and so I believe what happens and you all could correct me so this is on obviously it's on stripe docs but then once you go to the quick start and if you're signed in right because again if you're signing with your swiper account and you download the demo it would populate with like all your API keys and your private keys and your session keys for that account that you're signed into so again it's not like you know this is not like like some fluffy code right like you can actually this is actually a real concrete solid demo that I could kind of go in I could run it and it will work and literally all I have to do is just sign in and hit the download button and then now I can kind of start going through what it actually feels like to use stripet that's exactly right and this is the best way to just take your first payment accept that first payment from your customer but if you take a look at uh what we're showing here um via the screen share you'll actually see on the left hand side of the screen there's the menu and you can see all the different options under stripe checkout um oh specifically uh yes exactly right there so you'll see there's a ton of different features and functionality and once you have accepted your first payment you can actually start customizing checkout with each of the features that we reference and many of these can be enabled with either no code At All by going into the dashboard and turning on or off some functionality or even by writing like one or two lines of code maximum to enable this functionality awesome yeah this is great so again folks if you're interested make sure you check out that link that's at the bottom of the screen right now um head over to the stripe checkout and you know try out our quick starts take a look at our dots we watch some of these videos that are on this channel because we have a lot of them that talk about Stripes checkout and again if you have any questions anything that you'd love to know about anything you know any type of suggestions or even just like sharing with us like what your experience was like we'd definitely love to hear that but with that being said I think this is the end of the show folks so again Josh CJ thank you all so much for being here thank all of you for watching and we'll see you again next week where we're going to continue talking about stripe checkout for the entire month of September all right bye folks thank you bye friends foreign [Music]

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