--- title: SaaS Fundamentals 01 - A primer for collecting recurring payments with Stripe slug: saas-fundamentals-01-a-primer-for-collecting-recurring-payments-with-stripe published_at: 2022-08-29 19:43:59 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:05 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn the high level process of setting up recurring payments using the Stripe API. We'll define some terms and prepare for the series of videos walking through all the steps and best practices for setting up subscriptions. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:40 Simple web application walkthrough 01:40 Integration options and complexity 02:05 The customer object and payment methods 02:40 Products 03:20 Subscriptions ### Resources Written version of this content: https://dev.to/stripe/a-primer-for-collecting-recurring-payments-with-stripe-4mik Overview of Subscriptions https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/overview ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 #payments #stripe #saas tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, @cjav_dev, billing, subscriptions, recurring payments, saas fundamentals, SaaS Fundamentals 01 - A primer for collecting recurring payments with Stripe, tutorial, web development, webdev, web development tutorial, ruby on rails, ruby on rails tutorial] views: 2101 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/saas-fundamentals-01-a-primer-for-collecting-recurring-payments-with-stripe youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PHoQ6VD5E8 youtube_id: 9PHoQ6VD5E8 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/9PHoQ6VD5E8 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9PHoQ6VD5E8/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # SaaS Fundamentals 01 - A primer for collecting recurring payments with Stripe *Published: August 29, 2022* *Views: 2101* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PHoQ6VD5E8) [![SaaS Fundamentals 01 - A primer for collecting recurring payments with Stripe](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9PHoQ6VD5E8/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PHoQ6VD5E8) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn the high level process of setting up recurring payments using the Stripe API. We'll define some terms and prepare for the series of videos walking through all the steps and best practices for setting up subscriptions. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 00:40 Simple web application walkthrough 01:40 Integration options and complexity 02:05 The customer object and payment methods 02:40 Products 03:20 Subscriptions ### Resources Written version of this content: https://dev.to/stripe/a-primer-for-collecting-recurring-payments-with-stripe-4mik Overview of Subscriptions https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/overview ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 #payments #stripe #saas ## Transcript stripe billing is the fastest way for your business to bill customers with subscriptions and accept recurring payments globally in this series you'll learn the fundamentals for setting up an integration to accept recurring payments we'll cover things like starting subscriptions customer onboarding collecting payments managing the customer life cycle and also offering ways to cancel and move between plants this series won't go into the more advanced details like metered usage based or tiered subscriptions but you'll walk away with the basic building blocks and an understanding that you can build on and apply [Music] so as a frame of reference let's walk through a simple web application that implements subscription billing already when the customer first visits your site they're typically greeted with some landing page this is going to be the place where we might ask the customer to sign up register or join some sites will make a call to action like start today you know begin your free trial start with 14 days free and we'll come back to that integration flow later in a different episode when a customer signs up for your service you might collect things like birthday shipping address or other product preferences in order to onboard the customer to your business now this is the pricing page and it displays the products and prices you offer in the next episode in the series we'll talk about how to model your business with products and prices so you can take advantage of all the best checkout and customer portal features the payment form collects a name and payment information stripe hosts this form if you use checkout or payment links and it's one of the key features that allows you to collect payments and remain pci compliant now there's several options that vary in integration complexity from no code all the way up to a full custom payment form and we're going to cover those shortly access provisioning is when you'll grant access to these products and features that a customer just paid for this happens behind the scenes using a web hook if you're not familiar with web hooks don't worry we have several episodes that cover web hooks in depth so let's get into the core resources you'll need to understand getting started with the customer object so a customer object allows you to collect recurring payments for the same customer it's going to allow us to track those multiple charges over time now your customers payment instruments are how they pay for the service so this is their card details or maybe their bank account details there's several payment method types that stripe offers all of them support one-time payments but some of them also support recurring payments it is a subset so you'll want to check and see which payment method types are supported products are what your business offers whether that's a good or a service products are going to include the name and maybe some features they might also have an image and you'll note that if we have this basic product it might have fewer features than a pro product these are separate products but they're often represented on the page as sort of different tiers or different pricing levels that you might purchase or different pricing levels that you might subscribe to each of these products is going to have one or many prices prices represent how much and how often to charge for products it also includes how much the product costs how frequently or what the interval is for the price if it's a subscription and also which currency to use subscriptions are the product details associated with the plan that your customer subscribes to that allows you to charge the customer on a recurring basis so this subscription is going to be related to the customer their payment method and then a specific price for a given product so an invoice is a statement of amounts owed by a customer subscriptions are going to automatically generate these invoices for you you can sort of think of a subscription object as an engine that generates invoices depending on the recurring interval of the price related to the subscription for a customer that's how frequently an invoice will automatically be generated for instance if you are on a monthly price you might have a new invoice every single month for a specific subscription there's several ways to start subscriptions today you can start a subscription with no code at all using a stripe payment link or you can use stripe checkout or you can directly use the api to create customers and subscriptions and then use the payment element to collect payment details stay tuned in the next few episodes and you're going to learn how to model your business to onboard customers build pricing pages and start to manage subscriptions thanks for watching and we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## 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