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My personal view, is that the cons significantly outweigh the pros in a situation like this. I know your pain, as I recently went through the subscription hell

My personal view, is that the cons significantly outweigh the pros in a situation like this. I know your pain, as I recently went through the subscription hell (confirm emails, error checking, change credit card, valid_until, webooks, accounting stats, etc), but this is the core of your company and it needs to be right. Stripe was actually the easy part, it is all the scaffolding around it to make subscriptions work, which is extremely painful. If this out-sourced saas goes out of business tomorrow, you are royally screwed, has a security issue, screwed, hardware failure with data loss, screwed, bad service, customers are screwed, you are screwed, etc, etc. There needs to be a better way I know, I'm just not sure this is the answer, and it is just way to risky. Having said all that, I think https://www.ccbill.com/ https://www.ccbill.com/ does something close to what you are looking for.

andrewstuart 12y ago
I just want to get a subscription product out there fast, not spend three months building yet another user registration database with oauth and payments. What I really need is something like shopify - but allowing subscription payments via Stripe. I also need Shopify to provide an API so I can query my user database and do stuff with it. I want someone else to be taking care of user interface stuff. I should be able to pay and get a gorgeous looking site that works well on mobile and desktop, facilitates user signin via oauth, allows me to set up products and prices, lets people purchase my services on a recurring basis, doesn't try to own my user base and lets me write code to access all the relevant user and account and product data. I do agree that there is a level of risk of the provider going bust but I'm willing to take that risk at least in the initial stages of a project. To offset risk I need to be able to get backups or replication of my user database out of the Shopify system. Surely it's an opportunity for someone. Here's what needs to be melted together: -- Shopify -- Stripe -- StormPath -- oauth.io -- and maybe something like Strikingly or Squarespace. Put it all together and you basically get a digital subscription goods business in a box. I could immediately get going writing code to provide my digital service, not wasting my time building shops and user databases and login systems AGAIN.
- WestCoastJustin 12y ago
  Preaching to the choir ;) If someone reputable built it, I would also highly be interested, as it is such a pain re: subscriptions. It would be nice if Stripe just had a spinoff that handled all this as there is major overlap in skills required.
andrewstuart 12y ago
>> this is the core of your company and it needs to be right A dedicated third party company is going to do this better than me. There's ALOT to do if you want to cover all bases, mobile, desktop, visual design etc.
- WestCoastJustin 12y ago
  Yeah, that could definitely be true. It took me about 3 weeks of full-time work to get it to the point where I felt safe with it. Tons of test transactions, error checking, dummy accounts, etc. If you were not a programmer, and wanted to configure some type of subscription service, I literally have no idea how you would do that w/ stripe. This is not for everyone and there should be a turn key solution like Shopify. I 100% agree. This was basically time that I blew, working on something people almost never see, when I could have been building my product.
  - andrewstuart 12y ago
    Can I ask what your product is?
    - WestCoastJustin 12y ago
      Sure, the site is https://sysadmincasts.com/ https://sysadmincasts.com/. I do a weekly screencast about sysadmin topics.
      - andrewstuart 12y ago
        Looks good. So you're a systems guy - even us techies don't want to be writing the same stuff over and over again. Are you getting many people signing up?
        WestCoastJustin 12y ago
        It's only been ~3 weeks or so since I started to accept subscribers, so it is still too early to really say, but there are a few. My plan is it build it up over the next few years.

andrewstuart 12y ago

I just want to get a subscription product out there fast, not spend three months building yet another user registration database with oauth and payments. What I really need is something like shopify - but allowing subscription payments via Stripe. I also need Shopify to provide an API so I can query my user database and do stuff with it. I want someone else to be taking care of user interface stuff. I should be able to pay and get a gorgeous looking site that works well on mobile and desktop, facilitates user signin via oauth, allows me to set up products and prices, lets people purchase my services on a recurring basis, doesn't try to own my user base and lets me write code to access all the relevant user and account and product data. I do agree that there is a level of risk of the provider going bust but I'm willing to take that risk at least in the initial stages of a project. To offset risk I need to be able to get backups or replication of my user database out of the Shopify system. Surely it's an opportunity for someone. Here's what needs to be melted together: -- Shopify -- Stripe -- StormPath -- oauth.io -- and maybe something like Strikingly or Squarespace. Put it all together and you basically get a digital subscription goods business in a box. I could immediately get going writing code to provide my digital service, not wasting my time building shops and user databases and login systems AGAIN.

WestCoastJustin 12y ago
Preaching to the choir ;) If someone reputable built it, I would also highly be interested, as it is such a pain re: subscriptions. It would be nice if Stripe just had a spinoff that handled all this as there is major overlap in skills required.

andrewstuart 12y ago

>> this is the core of your company and it needs to be right A dedicated third party company is going to do this better than me. There's ALOT to do if you want to cover all bases, mobile, desktop, visual design etc.

WestCoastJustin 12y ago
Yeah, that could definitely be true. It took me about 3 weeks of full-time work to get it to the point where I felt safe with it. Tons of test transactions, error checking, dummy accounts, etc. If you were not a programmer, and wanted to configure some type of subscription service, I literally have no idea how you would do that w/ stripe. This is not for everyone and there should be a turn key solution like Shopify. I 100% agree. This was basically time that I blew, working on something people almost never see, when I could have been building my product.
- andrewstuart 12y ago
  Can I ask what your product is?
  - WestCoastJustin 12y ago
    Sure, the site is https://sysadmincasts.com/ https://sysadmincasts.com/. I do a weekly screencast about sysadmin topics.
    - andrewstuart 12y ago
      Looks good. So you're a systems guy - even us techies don't want to be writing the same stuff over and over again. Are you getting many people signing up?
      - WestCoastJustin 12y ago
        It's only been ~3 weeks or so since I started to accept subscribers, so it is still too early to really say, but there are a few. My plan is it build it up over the next few years.