Typically, you have to write code to handle checkouts, upgrades/downgrades, failed payments, then receive webhooks to provision features, reset usage limits etc. We abstract this into one function call for all payments flows (checkouts, upgrades, downgrades etc), one function to record usage (so we can track usage limits), and a customer state React hook you can access from your frontend (to handle paywalls, display usage data etc).
Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFARthC7JXc
Stripe’s great! But there are 2 main reasons people use Autumn over a direct Stripe setup:
(1) Billing infra can get complex. After payments, there’s still handling webhooks, permission management, metering, usage resets, and connecting them all to upgrade, downgrade, cancellation and failed payments states.
(2) Growing companies iterate on pricing often: raising prices, experimenting with credits or charging for new features, etc. We save you from having to handle usage-based limits (super common in pricing today), rebuilding in-app flows, DB migrations, internal dashboards for custom pricing, and grandfathering users on different pricing.
Ripping out billing flows etc, really sucks. With Autumn, you just make pricing changes in our UI and it all auto-updates. We have a shadcn/ui component library that helps with this.
Because we support a lot of different pricing models (subscriptions, usage, credits, seat based etc), we have to handle a lot of different scenarios and cases under the hood. We try to keep setup simple while maintaining flexibility of a native integration. Here’s a little snippet of the architecture of our main endpoint: https://useautumn.com/blog/attach
Currently, the users who get the most value out of us are founders that need to move fast and keep things flexible, but also new/non-technical devs that are more AI native.
You can clone the project and explore the repo, or try it out at https://useautumn.com/, where it’s free for builders. Our repo is https://github.com/useautumn/autumn, docs are at https://docs.useautumn.com/ and demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFARthC7JXc
We’d love to hear your feedback and how we could make it better!
btw, if you still want to go directly with stripe, here are some general recommendations/notes I generally agree with:
1. Race conditions. There are some weird conditions to handle around if a user makes it back to your app post-payment before the webhook, or if they click twice on a purchase button accidentally.
2. Keeping usage reset cycles in sync with billing cycles. We had a bunch of weird cases to solve in February as it's a shorter month.
3. Handling annual plans that have monthly usage billing cycles. Or just handling anything to do with transitioning between annual and yearly billing.
Theo's approach is awesome and a very similar architecture to what we have.