Before moving too far into a project, I'm looking to know if with my twilio account I can have two different numbers being billed separately, or if it's only able to be on one invoice. I work for a small organization in which I do bulk text messaging to make sure everyone gets updates, invites, etc. The leaders ask me for the monthly invoice and repay me for the cost. Now, I don't want them to unknowingly be paying for my private project. If I was to purchase a second number, could it be billed separately so that invoices could be separately?
Yes, but only if that is under a completely different Twilio Project.
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Does anyone have experience implementing multiple subscriptions model for an app? I wasn't able to find proper documentation about this topic. The most common way to create in-app subscription model is one-subscription per one-user. But I want to offer one-subscription per one-item(in my app). This means that users can create multiple subscriptions if they want to subscribe to multiple items. Each item is functionally the same.
For example, If the app is a pet location tracker and wants to track both pet A and B, the user has to subscribe to each A and B respectively. It means a total of 2 subscriptions.
Please explain it to me.
Thanks.
Never thought about such a use case, but for iOS you can create multiple subscriptions. So you could create a subscription PetA, PetB, PetC and so on. But, I think you asked for a more dynamic approach where you create a Pet subscription and the user can buy as much as he likes. As far as I know this isn't possible.
A different approach would be to create a subscription hierarchy: onePet, twoPets, threePets and so one. Your user can then up or down grade between those subs depending on how many pets he wants to track. Could get messy if you also want to offer different durations.
A third approach could be to use consumable IAPs. These can be purchased as often as the user likes, but have the disadvantage that you need to keep track of the validity period on your own and they can't be synced automatically between multiple devices.
For your pet example I would go for the second approach and offer a onePet, twoPet, threePet and a unlimitPet subscription. This is the most maintainable approach as long as you do not offer endless duration variations. Also this gets synced automatically with all devices of the user and if you like you can also support family sharing.
I am working on a project where I need to capture one time payments from an account. For a bit of background: The account has many users, where users are part of teams as team_members. I have another model we can call projects where teams are affixed to the project. It is on these individual projects that I would like to have a checkout button. The price for this one time payment should be calculated based on the number of individuals in a team, that are part of this project.
My issue is that I am not 100% sure how to achieve this for one time payments in stripe. Should I set this up alike that if I were to sell an individual item? Product (with name, description and price) and an Order to affix to the user?
I've built subscriptions plans in Stripe before, but have never really used one time payments. Any guidance on setup here would be really great.
Small Edit:
When a project is created, a team is selected. That team size is known to the project.
If I have 3 tiers for pricing:
1-5 people in a team is $x
6-20 people in a team is $y
21+ people in a team is $z
How would I go about invoking the correct tier based on the team size for the project?
If you want to keep users on your application while paying, following the web payment example is what you'll want to do. You would provide the amount when creating the PaymentIntent.
You should calculate the amount you want to charge in your own business logic. Once you've got that number, there are several ways you can collect one-time payments with Stripe.
If you want to offer the most flexibility for supported payment methods with the lowest amount of integration effort, Checkout would be a great option. You would supply the amount and a description with the line items while creating the checkout session.
If you want to keep users on your application while paying, following the web payment example is what you'll want to do. You would provide the amount when creating the PaymentIntent.
I have an SAAS online product (it affects people with twitter accounts, suggests people\pages to follow based on your previous interests).
I would like to add the option to schedule tweets (an ability to not send a tweet now, but schedule it for later, so a person can schedule several tweets at a time and it will be send out during the week) to my product, because I have noticed a lot of people pay for it.
How can I add this functionality to my product, in a way that will be competitive and people will use it?
I would greatly appreciate any help with this, since it's a key for my product's growth.
Thanks!
We have two .NET apps used to import customers and transactions into our db.
One is "client" app running on QB user's side another one is a small web service to interact with web connector.
We save all custmers and their "base class" transactions / changes in our DB and display on a web site. Users can see their transaction information there. Problem is that customer's balance does not always get equal to Sum(Amount) for their transactions. We already know that a customer can have a job (sub level customer) and count those transactions too. Still it appeared that a customer can get payment discounts and we needed to count that too.
What is a reliable way of counting customer's balance which always coinside with to their balance ?
I read a post about using Balance Detail Reports but I'd like not use it.
Thanks,
Vlad
It's hard to give a exact answer as there's a lot of little pieces that you may be missing, we don't know how you are calculating your totals so it's just guess work here. Here's a list of the transactions that I know of that effect a customer's balance, along with some things to look for.
Invoices can have a subtotal and sales tax which should both increase the balance.
Receive Payments can have discounts which should also reduce the balance along with the payment amount.
Journal Entries against Accounts Receivable for the Customer will either increase or decrease the balance depending on if it's a debit or credit to the AR account.
Credit Memos should reduce the balance.
Keep in mind there may be more than one Accounts Receivable account, so you need to make sure you don't filter for all A/R accounts on Journal Entries.
Your best bet to figure out what you are missing is to find a customer who has a different balance than what you calculated and review your detailed transactions vs. the detailed transaction for the customer in QuickBooks.
We want to add billing capabilities to our rails-driven web application. I've come across two plugins that do that - Service Merchant (which is free) and SaaS Rails kit (which costs money).
Does someone have some experience with these plugins (or others with the same functionality)? which one would you recommend?
Thanks!
I looked at both of them and unfortunately neither met my needs.
You say that you want to "add billing capabilities" -- but how complex are your bills?
Subscriptions?
Multiple subscriptions possible per customer at same time?
Any variable monthly costs? (eg the customer pays every month, but the amount they pay varies depending on something.)
Any additional items that aren't monthly? (eg setup charge, consulting, etc)
Billing subscriptions in advance? (like the phone company bills monthly service.) Or billing in arrears? (Customer uses service, then you bill them.)
There are very expensive companies you can outsource this stuff to (~ $25K - $50K and up for initial setup). Eg www.zuora.com
Or you can roll your own and charge the credit card using ActiveMerchant. Be sure to store the credit card info at your card processor (eg Authorize.Net Customer Information Manager).
If you're venture backed, then consult your VC for ideas. It may be worthwhile for you to outsource the whole thing.
If you're a lean startup, use one of the low-end guys if you have a simple subscription model. If your billing is more complex than that, the right answer may be to roll your own.
Low end subscription billers: Chargify, recurly, Google for "subscription billing"
No experience with those plugins, but I highly recommend using chargify to do recurring subscription billing. You'll use their rest-based API to create 'subscriptions' and it handles all of the charges, emails, and canceling subscriptions for you.
You'll pay chargify per user on a monthly basis (but it's cheap), and you pay the credit card processor, but there's no setup fees to chargify to get started.
http://chargify.com/