My 2 cents on this. You need to think ahead a bit on how you might use the user management layer down the line. Even if you decide to move away from XYZ servic

My 2 cents on this. You need to think ahead a bit on how you might use the user management layer down the line. Even if you decide to move away from XYZ service that you started with, you need to at some point replicate all the functionality that made you want to go with them in the first case. Ideally, your best bet is to use this kind of service for as long as you can to minimize service disruption to your users. As you pointed out, "A dedicated third party company is going to do this better than me." A better approach, IMO, is to go for an authentication service that is flexible for a longer term and satisfies your core requirements today (ie user management functions). The payment stuff is anyway custom (as the nature of your plans are unique to your business) and can be easily achieved a 3rd party platform where the user layer is integrated via OAuth. One simple approach here is to use Wordpress with WooCommerce (ready packages exist) as your "sales" layer + an integration module to Stormpath/Auth0/etc to sync the user auth layer. This is a solved problem for Wordpress sites, and you just need to link it to an OAuth layer that does what you need. I get that you don't want to write any code, but no two businesses are alike especially in the subscriptions game, and you're better off spending a little time to get this setup the way you want, instead of having to live with what someone else gives you. We just went through a similar exercise, and this is the understanding we arrived at. We're using Auth0 (www.auth0.com) instead of Stormpath as we plan to deploy quite a few micro-apps linked to a single login, and we don't want to be charged by the number of apps we have, but by our user volume. Otherwise, the service feature-sets are quite similar. Hope this helps. P.S We're using ChargeBee (www.chargebee.com) to handle our subscription billing management and we're writing some minors scripts to automate our user layer based on the payment status.