Subscription Management - Best Practices

I've used Stripe & Paddle.. here's my advice:

Create plans in the payment gateway. Create the same plans in your SaaS app.
Keep customer id, plan id, and subscription id in both locations.
Allow subscribing/cancelling/resubscribing in your app. You'll need plan id, subscription id, customer id.

Dates like trial end dates or billing period end dates (think cancelled subscription, but user is allowed to use up rest of period) should in my opinion not be kept in two places, your payment gateway is the master of this.

Use your payment gateway webhooks so if it says something is up, your app can react: failed charges, expiring credit card, subscription will renew soon, successful charge, subscription cancelled after x failed payments.

Following this because I'm interested to know what others are doing as well. Can't seem to find any solid articles on the topic. (Or I'm not searching the right thing)

Hi pbaumer,

I run a subscription billing software myself and I thought I can give you insights on this.

The answer to your question will depend upon the payment gateway that you are willing to use.

In the case of PayPal Standard: Subscriptions will be created at PayPal's end itself so, either way, you don't have to worry about anything.

PayPal Payflow works differently and you will be locked with one billing service provider if you use that.

In the case of Stripe: Keep the Stripe customer id in your database. So that you can trigger the customer id and bill that customer in future without any issues.

You can look how we implemented djaodjin-saas on read the docs (https://djaodjin-saas.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). The code is on GitHub. We have also implemented and documented deferred accounting (important for plans paid multiple periods in advance). Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Always looking forward to improve.

I make Windows desktop software. My customer information, expiry dates etc live in a licensing database which the apps connect to regularly.
The payment gateways send information to the licensing gateway, I make an endpoint for each payment gateway.
Once a customer starts with a payment gateway moving them to another is a non-trivial task but sending new customers to a new gateway or using multiples (including cash) is just another endpoint or manual entry for the licensing server.
Work out what you can own and what you need to outsource, let go of the ownership of what you outsource.