#hiroshi nishio
west marlin
fathom dawn
Is it unnecessary to have both a customer portal and a checkout session? The checkout session seems to always create a new subscription for some reason, so I should find out beforehand if a subscription already exists, right? But if so, is it enough to just use the customer portal from the beginning?
For me, simply one product and one subscription is enough. I'm concerned about duplicate billing if the exact same subscriptions are generated for users.
wild pecan
Both are for different usecases. Customer portal is for customer management, like allowing users to update their current subscriptions, payment methods etc. Checkout Session is to collect one-off payments or collecting initial payment to start a subscription
You don't need to use Checkout Session for recurring payments of a subscription
that's done automatically
fathom dawn
I don't mean that, but I want to prevent double subscriptions from being unintentionally created, for example, if a user subscribes in the checkout session and then does it again by mistake.
wild pecan
Ah in that case your integration needs to check if the customer has an active subscription already before redirecting them to a Checkout Session
fathom dawn
Hmm Ok but Why does the checkout create a new subscription each and every time?
wild pecan
That's expected behavior. Checkout isn't programmed to look at the customer's active subscriptions and prevent new subscriptions accordingly. That piece is typically designed by the developers themselves.
fathom dawn
Then, if it's a saas business and there is only one type of subscription, it might be better to give users who don't have a subscription yet a subscription and skip to the customer portal, rather than skip to checkout in the first place.
In other words, it sounds like a checkout session is unnecessary.
How do you think??
wild pecan
Again, it defers from use-case to use-case. They both are for different things. If there's always going to be only one subscription, you still need your customers to be able to start that subscription somehow. If you don't use Checkout then you'd need to build your own UI to handle that
fathom dawn
Yes it differs from use case to use case but how about this use case?
In this use case, I don't see the benefit of using a checkout session. To add to this, I have already implemented both the portal and checkout and noticed it during testing.
wild pecan
Not sure if I am on the same page here, How exactly are you thinking about starting a subscription without using a Checkout Session?
fathom dawn
I have a pricing page, but there is only one pay-as-you-go plan there, so if a user presses subscribe, I'm thinking of creating a subscription object behind the scenes and sending the user to the portal from the beginning.