--- title: SaaS Fundamentals 08 - Subscriber management with the customer portal slug: saas-fundamentals-08-subscriber-management-with-the-customer-portal published_at: 2022-09-23 16:06:11 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:02 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn how to enable customers to manage their billing using the customer portal. The customer portal is a feature rich Stripe hosted page where customers can do things like update their card on file, change their subscription, or cancel. You can configure what customers are allowed to do from the settings in your dashboard, or by creating a Customer Portal Configuration using the API. We'll focus on integrating the customer portal. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Contents 00:00 Introduction to the customer portal 01:41 Configuring the customer portal in your app 03:07 Configure your front-end 04:29 Configure your portal in the dashboard 05:30 Conclusion ### Resources Integrating the customer portal: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/integrating-customer-portal Article: https://dev.to/stripe/managing-the-customer-billing-lifecycle-using-the-customer-portal-307j ### 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 #saas #stripe #payments #ruby tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, @cjav_dev] views: 1079 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/saas-fundamentals-08-subscriber-management-with-the-customer-portal youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMc-YcuQVts youtube_id: zMc-YcuQVts embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/zMc-YcuQVts thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zMc-YcuQVts/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # SaaS Fundamentals 08 - Subscriber management with the customer portal *Published: September 23, 2022* *Views: 1079* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMc-YcuQVts) [![SaaS Fundamentals 08 - Subscriber management with the customer portal](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zMc-YcuQVts/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMc-YcuQVts) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn how to enable customers to manage their billing using the customer portal. The customer portal is a feature rich Stripe hosted page where customers can do things like update their card on file, change their subscription, or cancel. You can configure what customers are allowed to do from the settings in your dashboard, or by creating a Customer Portal Configuration using the API. We'll focus on integrating the customer portal. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Contents 00:00 Introduction to the customer portal 01:41 Configuring the customer portal in your app 03:07 Configure your front-end 04:29 Configure your portal in the dashboard 05:30 Conclusion ### Resources Integrating the customer portal: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/integrating-customer-portal Article: https://dev.to/stripe/managing-the-customer-billing-lifecycle-using-the-customer-portal-307j ### 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 #saas #stripe #payments #ruby ## Transcript once you have that full customer onboarding in place and you're giving access to paid features you'll inevitably start to have support requests where customers want to change their payment method on file upgrade and downgrade before between different tiers and plans and maybe they'll want to cancel their plan they may want to even see their invoice history all of this is stuff that you would need to build if there weren't the customer portal so the stripe customer portal again is this very nice stripe hosted surface where you can redirect customers to and they can handle all of their customer life cycle management directly inside of the customer portal once they're done they can be redirected back to your site technically you could Implement all of this yourself it's all available through the API updating payment methods on file changing the subscription maybe moving between different plan levels or moving from monthly to annual that's all available through the stripe API and if you wanted to implement that yourself you totally could however it's much much faster if you just rely on and depend on the stripe customer portal this is going to save you a ton of time if the Investments That stripe is making in the customer portal to improve how localized it is all of the different features the different configurations that are available will save you a ton of time so in my experience from building SAS applications and businesses in the past this was one of the most onerous projects that anyone had to undertake was managing billing and setting up all these interfaces for customers to cancel their plan or change between plans and now you can offload all of that to stripe with a single API call to create this thing called a customer portal session [Music] all right so let's take a look at how that works right now we're able to access our dashboard but what we want to do is add a button here that will bring us to the customer portal we're going to head back into the terminal and rails G controller we're going to generate a new controller called Billings before we forget let's go over to our routes and add this new resource or billing and in our Billings controller we're going to add a show route where we're going to create the billing portal session and redirect there but again we want to ensure that we have a logged in user here so we're going to say before action authenticate user now we're going to create a billing portal session now because we're using the page M this is really easy we can just say current user dot payment processor Dot billing portal and then we redirect to billing portal session dot URL we need to allow other hosts again because the billing the customer portal is again hosted on a stripe domain and the status will again be C other now from our dashboard show page we need to just add a link here that's going to go to manage billing this will be the the billing path and we are redirected to the customer portal now through our testing we have a bunch of different payment method types in here so let's actually go back and log out we'll join today as a brand new user or signing up from scratch heading over to our pricing and we're going to go to our monthly billing for the 28 a month plan that seems like a good plan we'll enter in some test card details here and we're going to say that we are in San Francisco California so we do have to pay some tax for this we also want to subscribe you can notice if we wanted to we could save our information for one click checkout we are also donating one percent of the subscription help fight climate change all right so let's go over to our dashboard and now we have this manage billing link click on manage billing and now we are redirected to the customer portal and we see that we have just one plan if we wanted to we can update our plan we can switch between annual and monthly again for all of our different price points here if we wanted to let's go switch to the annual plan for startups again if you wanted to you can change the unit amount here for the startup this is for like the number of seats this is controlled via the portal config let's head over to the dashboard and see how we can configure the customer portal we want to go to settings in test mode and we're going to our customer portal settings under the billing section now there's a lot of different stuff that you can enable or configure here but the most important thing I want to show you is that our products here are again need to follow that exact modeling of our other products now one of the things that we wanted to disable was being able to control the subscription quantities because our application only supports one subscription at one level there's not like separate seats so we're going to save that and now when we come back over to our billing settings we can no longer control the the number of seats so now we can confirm that and our subscription is now fully updated we will receive some web hook notifications in the back end and those are going to be handled by the pagem and again now we can just see our dashboard everything is provisioned so that really offloads a lot of the work of the full customer lifecycle management to the customer portal and that wraps up our entire demo we really appreciate your time and attention hopefully this was useful thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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