Flat-Rate Billing Quick Start

Introduction

Flat-rate billing means charging a fixed amount per billing cycle. £99 per/year, £14 per/14 days and £20 per/month are all examples of this billing model.

Flat-rate line items support a quantity field, allowing you to charge for things that come in units such as consultancy hours, training sessions, support tickets, and retainer time. Each billing cycle the customer will be charged the flat rate price multiplied by the quantity specified at checkout.

1. Create and configure your product

Before you can start implementing Salable into your codebase, you need to sign up for an account and create a product in the Salable dashboard.

You will need to create a product, the plans that you want the users to be able to subscribe to, and any entitlements your users should be able to access depending on their subscription.

As an example, if your application was a music streaming service. You may offer “Basic” and “Pro” plans, with ad_free_listening, curated_playlists, and unlimited_playlists as your entitlements.

To charge money for your "Pro" plan, set up a Line Item with a Pricing Type of "Flat Rate".

Plans that share the same Tier Tag are mutually exclusive, an owner can only subscribe to one of them at a time. In the example above, Basic and Pro would share the Tier Tag of "core". The same owner can still purchase additional plans like add-ons that do not have the Tier Tag.

2. Generate a Stripe checkout link

In order to accept payment from a user, you will need to generate a checkout link.

import { Salable } from '@salable/sdk';
const salable = new Salable('secret-api-key');
 
const { data } = await salable.api.checkout.post({
    planId: 'plan_01KHNZHBA28YMY720VVD8KVKF5',
    owner: 'user_123',
    grantee: 'user_123',
    interval: 'month',
    intervalCount: 1,
    currency: 'USD',
    successUrl: 'https://your-app.com/success',
    cancelUrl: 'https://your-app.com/cancel'
});
// Redirect user to data.url

const response = await fetch('https://salable.app/api/checkout', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
        Authorization: 'Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY',
        'Content-Type': 'application/json'
    },
    body: JSON.stringify({
        planId: 'YOUR_PLAN_ID',
        owner: 'user_123',
        grantee: 'user_123',
        interval: 'YOUR_INTERVAL', // 'month' or 'year'
        intervalCount: 1,
        currency: 'YOUR_PLANS_CURRENCY', // USD, GBP, EUR, etc
        successUrl: 'https://your-app.com/success',
        cancelUrl: 'https://your-app.com/cancel'
    })
});
 
const { data } = await response.json();
// Redirect user to data.url

3. Add entitlement checks to your application

In your application, you will only want to allow the grantee to perform certain actions if they have an active subscription.

We can check for a grantee's active entitlements as follows:

import { Salable } from '@salable/sdk';
const salable = new Salable('secret-api-key');
 
const { data } = await salable.api.entitlements.check.get({
    queryParameters: {
        granteeId: 'user_123'
    }
});
 
const granteeHasEntitlement = data.entitlements.find(e => e.value === 'ad_free_listening');
 
if (granteeHasEntitlement) {
    // Allow the user to perform the action in your system.
}

const response = await fetch('https://salable.app/api/entitlements/check?granteeId=YOUR_GRANTEE_ID', {
    headers: {
        Authorization: 'Bearer YOUR_SECRET_KEY'
    }
});
 
const { data } = await response.json();
 
const granteeHasEntitlement = data.entitlements.find(e => e.value === 'YOUR_ENTITLEMENT_NAME');
 
if (granteeHasEntitlement) {
    // Allow the user to perform the action in your system.
}

Setting up Entitlements allows you to easily create tailored plans for your customers' requirements. Copy any existing Plan, adjust its Entitlements and cost based on the agreed terms with the customer, and they immediately get the exact feature set you agreed without any code change. Now everything flows through Entitlements, sales can be instant.

4. Next steps

Now that you have payment processing and entitlement checking set up in your application, there are some further things you should set up to enable full subscription handling in your application:

• Cancel a Subscription
• Subscription Management Portal
• Webhooks