@macasekSubscriptions Preview
It has been a long time coming but we are finally gearing up to launch our initial subscription billing platform. I wanted to take a few minutes to give you a quick preview of what to expect and hopefully get some feedback.
Before we get into it, if you are not familiar with our current one-time billing offering, you may want to take a moment to check out our Seller’s Guide and Fulfillment API documents.
Subscription billing is hard. If you have ever done ecommerce work you know what I am talking about. If you have not done any ecommerce work you should probably just take my word for it, I probably shaved a few years off my life dealing with it. The main goal for our subscription (and one-time) offering is to provide a way for developers to get up and making money as painlessly and quickly as possible. Setting up a subscription for your Twitter app will essentially be the same as a one-time billling with a few extra notifications to address the status of your subscribers over time. We are also going to be rolling out a new “direct buy” page for each edition your app has on oneforty which you can direct customers to allowing them to quickly purchase your app.
While we want to support as many options as possible we will be placing a few restrictions on the initial subscription offering, the most notable of which is a billing cycle of 1 month. If a 1 month billing cycle is not what you are looking for please let us know what other cycles would be of interest. We also have some issues that are still out for debate including: what to do if a developer retires a subscription plan and if an existing plan’s price changes. If you have opinions on these matter we would love to hear from you!
On the notification front we will be expanding our Fulfillment API to include several new notification types including: subscription_renewal, subscription_past_due, and subscription_canceled. These notifications will be sent to the same url that is provided for the new purchases. In addition to these notifications we have discussed several other methods of keeping developers informed about the status of their subscribers, including: emails, api for retrieving active/past due subscriptions, and a dashboard for viewing active/past due subscriptions. Which of these are of interest to you? Are their other ways that you would like to be notified (e.g. DM)?
So that is a very quick preview of where our subscription offering is heading. Keep your eyes open over the next 2 weeks or so for more details. If you are interested in selling your subscription Twitter app on oneforty and would like to get an early start let us know.
As always if you have any questions, concerns, etc do not hesitate to get in touch with me directly at michael@oneforty.com and/or our developer email list developers@oneforty.com. You can also drop by our IRC room #oneforty on freenode.
Stay tuned!
