Stripe: How to set up recurring payments without plan?

3 comments

1. Another approach that Stripe suggests is to setup a plan with a recurring amount of $1 (or $0.01 for more flexibility) and then vary the quantity as needed.

   e.g. Using the $0.01 plan approach, if I wanted to charge 12.50/month I could adjust the quantity like so:

   $customer->subscriptions->create(array("plan" => "basic", "quantity" => "1250"));
   

   Stripe Support

   • How can I create plans that don’t have a fixed price?
   • Subscription Quantities

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2. First, you’ll need to create a new customer.

   On submit, you could use the custom amount to create a new plan:

   $current_time = time();
   $plan_name = strval( $current_time );
   
   Stripe_Plan::create(array(
           "amount" => $_POST['custom-amount'],
           "interval" => "month",
           "name" => "Some Plan Name " . $_POST['customer-name'],
           "currency" => "usd",
           "id" => $plan_name
       )
   );
   

   Keep in mind that the 'id' needs to be unique. You could use the customer’s name, a time stamp, or some other random method to ensure that this is always the case.

   You’d then just create the subscription on the newly-added customer:

   $customer = Stripe_Customer::retrieve($customer_just_created);
   $customer->subscriptions->create(array("plan" => $plan_name));
   

   You probably will be able to omit the first line above, as you should already have a customer variable assigned from when the customer was actually created.

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3. This is low tech, but the easiest thing I found was to use as little of the Stripe API as possible. Instead of creating subscription plans and products and things like that, you just:

   • Create a stripe customer.
   • Charge them with a cron job.

   If you already know how to charge somebody, you just have to figure out how to create the customer, and then the rest is good to go.

   This means you shift some of Stripe’s cleverness to our own infrastructure, but I actually found this easier to think about/maintain than thinking through all of Stripe’s API docs and features.

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