Hi,
We’ve been looking at launching a new web application and thinking about
how we can manage the payments for this.
Usual features apply: 30 day trial, take credit card for recurring
payments, automate invoice sending and payment allocation.
We’ve looked at various billing platforms such as Chedder Getter / Recurly
/ Chargify / ChargeBee etc. but it would be nice to keep everything in our
FreeAgent accounts.
Looking at the FreeAgent API I can do the following:
Customer registers in our web app with free 30 day access to the app.
Supplies contact/invoice/card details
At this point create a Stripe contact and recurring card profile
Create a CRON job to check for > 30 days (trial) at which point if not
cancelled trial
Create a Contact https://dev.freeagent.com/docs/contacts#create-a-contactin FreeAgent
Create an Invoicehttps://dev.freeagent.com/docs/invoices#create-an-invoice
In the absence of API call to create a recurring invoice, I’ll have to
create a new invoice on receipt of new payments from Stripe or via CRON.
This is where things get hazy… How can I allocate the Stripe payments to
the invoices in FreeAgent automatically?
Does Stripe appear in our accounts list like normal bank/PayPal accounts
and automatically matches payments? I guess this would be a manual task to
click and approve these every month (must be a better way)?
Am I stretching what can be done with FreeAgent too far and I should just
concentrate on a dedicated billing platform for our app?
Ta,
Pete