Designing an integration

Understanding the available subscription models is an important initial step in your integration as it informs later choices, like which pricing model and payment form to use. First, consider your business model:

• Do you want customers to pay, then provision access to your service?
  • Click the pay up front tab below to learn more.
• Do you want to collect payment details, then offer customers a free trial period before billing them?
  • Click the free trial tab below to learn more.
• Do you want to provide users access to your service without asking them for any payment information (a freemium model)?
  • Click the freemium tab below to learn more.

Pay up front

Free trial

Freemium

Pay-up-front model

In the pay-up-front model, you collect payment details and charge customers before provisioning access to your service. After the initial charge, you continue to charge customers the same fixed price for the same service at regular intervals. In this model, you use the Dashboard or Subscriptions API manage customer subscriptions. If you want to allow customers to modify their subscriptions directly, you need to integrate the customer portal.

For example, a photo hosting company that offers basic and premium service levels and charges customers on a monthly basis might have this setup:

• One product for the basic option
• One product for the premium option
• One price for the basic option (15 USD per month)
• One price for the premium option (25 USD per month)

A typical flow for this model would look like this:

1. The customer chooses their plan (basic or premium).
2. You collect payment information.
3. You provision access to your service. You know when to do this by monitoring webhook events.
4. You continue to provision access for customers throughout the lifecycle of the subscription. Check regularly to make sure you’re not providing access if a customer’s payment has failed.

See the integration guide to learn how to build an integration with a low-code approach that uses a prebuilt and hosted page from Stripe Checkout or a custom version with Stripe Elements.

If you need to meter usage, see metered billing. You need to do this when you create a price.

How do you want to collect payment information?

If you don’t want to write a lot of code, use Checkout, Stripe’s prebuilt, hosted payment page. See the subscriptions with Checkout integration guide to get started.

If you want a more customized payment form that you can embed into your existing website, use Elements, a set of prebuilt UI elements that’s part of Stripe.js.

How do you want your customers to modify their subscriptions after setting them up for the first time?

If you’re collecting payment information with Checkout, you can use the customer portal to allow customers to directly update their subscription details, like payment method and frequency. See the integration guide for detailed instructions on setting this up. (Before integrating, you should also be aware of the limitations of the portal.)

If you’re integrating with Elements, you can add a form on the frontend to collect details about the plan they want to change (like the price ID and their customer information) and send that to an endpoint on the backend. For more details and sample code, see the section about letting customers change their plans in the Elements quickstart.

If you’re providing the same good every month and don’t expect that to change, use a simple fixed-price model. If the price varies depending on the number of users or units, you can use volume-based or tier-based prices. For a complete list of available models and a detailed description of each one, see examples of pricing models.

Set up webhooks to receive notifications about subscription-related events. For example, when you see the invoice.paid=true notification, you can safely provision access to your service. See the subscription lifecycle for more information about webhook events. See subscription events for a complete list of subscription-related events.