---
title: SaaS Fundamentals 06 - Start a subscription with Checkout
slug: saas-fundamentals-06-start-a-subscription-with-checkout
published_at: 2022-09-16 15:00:25 +0000
updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:03 +0000
summary: 
description: In this episode, you'll learn how to start a subscription with Stripe Checkout to collect recurring payments for your SaaS business.   ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev  ### Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:57 Implementing a Checkout session with pay 04:31 Implementing a Checkout session with Stripe Ruby 06:23 Enabling tax calculation and other Checkout features 09:04 Conclusion  ### Resources Build a subscriptions integration: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/build-subscriptions Integration builder: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/quickstart Article: https://dev.to/stripe/start-a-subscription-to-collect-recurring-payments-with-stripe-faa   ### 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
tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, SaaS, Checkout, payment forms, subscription, @cjav_dev]
views: 937
author: CJ Avilla
url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/saas-fundamentals-06-start-a-subscription-with-checkout
youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTtJjOKLYsQ
youtube_id: pTtJjOKLYsQ
embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/pTtJjOKLYsQ
thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pTtJjOKLYsQ/hqdefault.jpg
type: video
---

# SaaS Fundamentals 06 - Start a subscription with Checkout

*Published: September 16, 2022*
*Views: 937*

## Watch

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

[![SaaS Fundamentals 06 - Start a subscription with Checkout](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pTtJjOKLYsQ/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTtJjOKLYsQ)

## Description

In this episode, you'll learn how to start a subscription with Stripe Checkout to collect recurring payments for your SaaS business.


### Presenter
CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev

### Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:57 Implementing a Checkout session with pay
04:31 Implementing a Checkout session with Stripe Ruby
06:23 Enabling tax calculation and other Checkout features
09:04 Conclusion

### Resources
Build a subscriptions integration: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/build-subscriptions
Integration builder: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/quickstart
Article: https://dev.to/stripe/start-a-subscription-to-collect-recurring-payments-with-stripe-faa


### 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

## Transcript

starting to collect recurring payments with stripe checkout is the next step and now that we have an authenticated user and we have a pricing page that's going to give us the ID of a price we're ready to go checkout is a page that's hosted by stripe where we're going to redirect customers they will fill out some payment information that'll start a subscription and they'll ultimately be redirected back to our application using stripe checkout is the recommended way to collect recurring payments for your SAS business this integration includes one API call to create this thing called a checkout session that'll have a URL property on it that we're going to redirect customers to I know there's a lot of arguments there but I definitely recommend going through the API reference for creating a checkout session and looking at every single possible argument and depending on your business you may want to enable some or disable others so go ahead and take a look at the documentation for creating checkout sessions [Music] recall that we have a pricing page here but when we click on the button to start the subscription we're redirected to slash checkout and we haven't actually implemented this in the query stream parameters we have a price ID and that is going to be the ID of the price for the related tier subscription the recurring interval the currency and the amount that we want to subscribe to we're going to take that price ID and create a checkout session within let's create a new controller called checkouts inside of our checkouts controller we're going to add a new action inside of a show which will create the checkout session and redirect us before we Implement that we want to make sure that we have an authenticated user on this page before we let them do anything so we're going to re have a B4 action authenticate user now inside of the show action we're going to create a checkout session now you can create one directly using the stripe ruby gem with stripe check out sessions.create session ular.create and passing in all of your different arguments including the mode of subscription and a customer ID like this now if you've stored the customer ID in your own database and you're you're manually building an integration this is the way that you would want to go because we're using the page M here we can say current user dot payment processor dot checkout we're going to pass along the mode as subscription and line items are going to be simply params price ID that's going to create a checkout session object with all of the sensible defaults we will redirect to the checkout sessions URL we need to allow other hosts because when we're using stripe checkout we're going to be redirected to checkout.stripe.com we also are going to set the status to see other now when we're using pay this is really all that we need to get started so we need to add a route here for resource checkout now when we make that get request we're redirected to the checkout page we can either use our link authenticated payment method which is pre-populated here because we're logged in with this uh this existing user or we could use another payment method in this case we could use a U.S bank account that will debit our bank account 28 every single month now when we click subscribe we are ultimately redirected back to our application notice that in the query string we have access to the ID of that checkout session if we wanted to we could display things or information about the checkout session here we could also customize where the customer is redirected back to now the most important thing is that we actually provision access and give someone access once they have paid and subscribed that we're going to do in another episode before we get there though I wanted to talk about a couple different things the first of which is inside of our checkout sessions controller or inside of our checkouts controller although this is the simplest way to do it and this is the way that we recommend using pay the pay gem to create a checkout session you could also create a checkout session directly using stripe rubygem by saying stripe check out sessions.session.create and then passing in all of your own arguments in which case we do need to include a customer object pay is going to include that for us by default but here we would need to say something like current user dot payment processor dot processor ID but in order to use that processor ID we first need to Cache the user object and make sure that we have a customer so we're going to say current user.payment processor Dot customer now again this is only required if we're going to use stripe Ruby directly all right so line items by default are a list of items and we're going to pass in the price and a quantity if you wanted to have a per seat model where customers paid per user on their account for instance then you might want to use this quantity to control how many seats they've purchased in our case we're only going to limit it to one seat you can also make this adjustable inside of stripe checkout using adjustable quantity when we create a checkout session we also need to pass a success URL and a cancel URL the success URL defines where the customer will be redirected after they've successfully subscribed the cancel URL is where we're going to send the customer if they bail out and say return to your application all right let's take this for a spin by going back to our pricing page and this time we'll go for the 32 dollar a month subscription level we're redirected to checkout again now we see this 32 dollars per month there's a lot of different things that we can enable with stripe checkout for instance we might want to enable automatic tax calculation so we could say automatic tax enabled true now if we want to enable automatic taxes we also need to enable customer address updating so if we go back let me show you what I mean so if we go back to localhost and we go through the the payment flow here and we're redirected to checkout we're going to see an error that says automatic tax calculation requires a valid address so we either need to update the customer object with an address or we need to allow the customer's address to be updated so we're gonna let's add this argument to our checkout session create call so that we can update the customer's address so we'll go through this checkout flow again customer update address Auto now we can see that sales tax is being calculated as part of the checkout process that's pretty neat another feature of checkout that I find very handy is being able to pass through some metadata so we can pass metadata at the top level here and specify that the user ID that this checkout session is for is our current user.id we can also set some metadata on the subscription so we can say subscription data has some metadata for the user ID again being the current user's ID since we're using the page M pay is going to handle a lot of the web hook work for us so we won't actually have to worry about this too much as a pro tip if you're implementing this without pay I'd highly recommend attaching the metadata with reference to the current user both at the checkout session level and the subscription level let's take a look at one other thing we can do we can enable promotion codes with allow promotion [Music] codes true now if we were to go back through checkout this time let's try out our Enterprise tier we'll see that we can enter in a promotion code if we happen to have one and click apply and now we have 20 off so that's pretty neat again there's a number of different options for creating a checkout session this might look a little bit daunting but really it's just configuring the the experience that your customers have when they redirect through checkout let's say we want to continue through with this subscription and we click subscribe now when we're redirected to the landing page we don't have any indication that the customer is actually subscribed and if we attempt to access the dashboard in fact we're redirected back to the pricing page so how do we know if the customer is actually subscribed great question and that's something that we're going to answer in the next episode when we talk about provisioning and we're going to talk about setting up your web hook events in your web hook forwarding thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one

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