Adding functionality to a product - twitter

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!

Related

Best way to offering multiple subscriptions for one user (iOS, Android)

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.

Can we change start date of auto-renewable subscription plan for iOS Apps?

We are working on an app right now and want to add a referral program in it. We are thinking a subscription-based model and want to extend free trial period if the user invites a friend and that friend will also get 7 days more on trial period. My question is if a user already subscribed and a first deduction will be on 1st June, how can we change it to 8th June after inviting friends? And Apple allows this? Please share code to how to do this. Thanks.
The short answer: It isn't possible to extend the duration of a given trial. The only way is to offer another one.
Apple provides you two ways to provide trials. As far as I undestand your intended behavior, you would need to combine both.
The first way is to provide a trial before paying, by offering an introductory offer. For each subscription you can create an individual introductory offer with its own duration. Each user can only receive one introductory offer per subscription group (see here for detailed information and how to create introductory offers). That‘s the reason why you also need the second way, though.
The second way is done by offering a subscription offers. Those can be granted as often as you wish, but require the user to have an active re-newable subscription (which he has, if he used your introductory offer).
Unfortunately the second way isn't simple to implement. You need a server to validate receips and to allow users to register, so you have a way to identify them. Also the server is responsible for generating the subscription offers.
You see subscriptions isn't an easy topic and so I hope you can understand that I and probably no one else can write you the code to achieve this. Apple provides a lot of informations and example code in the links I‘ve added. Work those through and come back with your code related questions and I think everyone will gladly answer them.
It's not possible using iOS subscription but you may need to create your own logic for free trial and remove trial from in-app subscription plan. In this way, you can promt user to subscribe after your custom free trail or even after extended free trial.

Best way to build a feed notification system like Facebook in Rails?

I'm a new junior developer joining to this awesome community. I'm developing my first big personal project, and I'm stuck with this specific part.
I would like to build a feed notification system like Facebook with the following features:
Track different models and relationships, for example: new badges earned, new comments in subscribed models, new posts by followed users, new comments on my posts, new likes on my posts...
Group the activities, for example, instead of have 400 activities for each likes in my post, has just one notification that says "User X and 399 more likes your post"
Be possible to mark notifications as readed to don't see them again, at least you explore past notifications.
Scalability, good perfomance, and possible integration in the future in an APP developed for example with Iconic framework.
Push notifications are optional, it's ok if the user need to refresh the page to see the new notifications.
So for that, I have readed a lot of. I have watched some Railcast Videos, followed tutorials, but still I'm not really sure how to begin.
I have considered the following methods:
Use public_activity gem, adding a new a new field "readed" to the migration. And thinking how to manage grouped activites. But I have seen a lot of complains about perfomance. I'm expecting to have around 50000 users in my website in the first month (I already have the users), with peaks of 500-1000 users online. So maybe this is not the best way to go... as I would have a lot of activities, a lot of "notifications" and a lot of users.
Use a system like https://getstream.io/ because they also have integrations available for RoR and Ruby. The main concern here is about pricing, because checking it, if I'm not wrong, with that number of users, with around 10 notifications per user per day, I would be paying probably more than 200$ month, and always keep growing as the users grow.
Build my own system, maybe using Redis. But maybe this would be too complex and require a lot of time for a good, efficient and working code.
So still, considered these option, I don't know which one is best for me, or if it's another possibilities.
If someone have asked before these questions, please let me know your thoughts and what you think is the correct way to go.
Thank you !! :)

Ruby on rails. Pay to post articles

I am have been using rails for about a week now and have created a website/app which for simplicity's sake we can call a job board. Users can create listings which other users can then apply for. Everything is working as desired. The next thing that I want to set up is the ability to charge users to create the listings.
After extensive searching, I can't find any tutorials that explain this process, just the typical cart and checkout for selling physical products.
I have been pondering solutions but I wanted to consult here for pro advice.
For the payment process (at least for now) I will most likely use active merchant and Paypal as I am based in Europe.
My current doubts are with setting up the modeling.
Would it be better to create a new model eg. 'credits', have users purchase 'credits', then run a variable when trying to create a 'job', eg. if_user_has_credits post the job else link to buy_credits_path, or is there a more direct way of achieving this through the already functional user and jobs models?
Any advice on setting up this functionality would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
I would try to create a credit system, so users just have to purchase credits and you can just drive the user to purchase credits in case they do not have enough for create a listing:
Simple one: Store the user' credit as balance field in the database, and all actions ("add", "deduct") are logged but not used to compute the latest balance. The balance-based way gives you fast access to the current amount
History based: Don't store the balance in database. The balance is computed by looking at the history of transactions, e.g. ("add", "deduct"). The history-based way gives you auditing. The history table should store the transaction, a timestamp, the balance before the transaction happened, and ideally a way to track the funds' source/destination.
You can use both. See the Ruby toolbox for bookeeping and Plutus
I recommend also using logging, and ideally read about secure log verification and provable timestamp chaining.
For logging details see techniques for ensuring verifiability of event log files

Visual data from logs

I have an app I'm working on that is a credits system for a store. A customer brings in items and receives a credit and then can turn around and use that credit towards certain goods in the store. I've set it up so every time a credit holder or credit is created,updated, or destroyed the event is logged. I'm wondering if there is an easy way to use the event data from the logs to create a dashboard displaying things such as X number of credits created and Y number of credits used today. This may not be the right way to go about doing this at all and if so feel free to guide me in another direction. Thanks in advance!
You should save the information into a database (in addition) to the log and operate on it in this fashion.
So for example, maybe you have a User it should be a Model and have credits which should be an integer. You can modify this value every time a transaction happens.
You can also create an associated model 'transactions' which belong_to the user and to find out transactions that happened on a certain day, you would be able to pull up all of the transactions of that user in a certain time range.
If your credits work similar to dollars and money. And your transactions are like orders, you may want to look into using the Spree gem. https://github.com/spree/spree
You definitely do not want to be reading from the logs to do very usual actions like you're describing.

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