Connect & Setup Stripe
If you have not connected to Stripe during signup, you can do so now on the Dashboard.
Currently you must have a fully complete Stripe account with bank details in order to connect to Billflow. If you wish to test around, check out our examples page to see how the billing pages look and how they are installed.
Now Billflow is connected to your Stripe account, let's set up your pricing
An important concept to understand is that both Stripe & Billflow have a 'Test Mode' and 'Live Mode'. Test Mode allows you to build out an entire integration and test the end-to-end process with fake payments using test CC information. When you're ready to take real payments, you can change your integration to Live Mode.
Start by performing the following steps in Test Mode, and things can easily be promoted to Live Mode.
In order to start taking payments, Products & Prices must first be created in Stripe.
If you already have Products in Stripe, and you only plan to use the Invoice Portal or Customer Portal with no Change Plan functionality, you can skip this section.
For a detailed process with specific pricing model examples, you can learn more here.
Determine how many tiers are going to be in your Product/Service offering, whether there is a free trial, and what the cost of each tier is. The following structure allows for very complex pricing including metered billing and combinations of pricing strategies. Once you know what you're going for, you can go to Step 2.
In the following example we will create two tiers for a SaaS application, SampleSaaS. The 'Basic' tier will be $10/mo and the 'Pro' tier will be $50/mo.
Stripe has an object called a 'Product'. You can create Products from the Stripe Dashboard. Products contain another object called 'Prices'. Products can contain multiple Prices.
The simple rules to creating your pricing model are as follows:
Create a Product for every tier and/or ‘metric’ you may have.
Based on our example, we will create two Products in Stripe, each with a single Price. One for our Basic tier, and one for the Pro.
Select Products and "+ Add Product" for each.
Fill in a name and give the Pricing information, then Save Product.
Lastly, we will add Metadata to the Stripe products you created. This metadata will tell Billflow which of your Stripe Products are part of your Service Offering, and what the tiers look like.
Every Product in your service offering will have two metadata tags, 'sb_service' and 'sb_tier'. Every Product will have the same value for 'sb_service' which will be the name of your service. Then, each Product corresponding to a tier will have the 'sb_tier' be name of the tier.
From our example we will give each product the 'sb_service' value of 'SampleSaaS'. And we will give the Basic tier an sb_tier value of 'Basic', and the Pro tier an 'sb_tier' value of 'Pro'.
Select each Product created before, and click 'Edit metadata'.
Now our Stripe account is ready to go, for detailed examples of specific pricing model examples, you can learn more here.
Next step is to invite team members.
