ShipRev holds what you sell and who subscribes to it: your products, capabilities and plans, each buyer organization's subscription, its invoice records and its wallet. Stripe takes the payments, on a Stripe account of yours. The money goes straight to that account.
Who does what
| ShipRev | Stripe, on your account | |
|---|---|---|
| What you sell | Products, capabilities, plans and plan versions; add-ons | The matching products and prices, created when you publish a plan version |
| Subscribing | The subscription of each buyer organization and the plan version it is on | Checkout and the card payment |
| Paying | Invoice records, written once and not changed afterwards | Charging the card, renewals and the billing portal |
| Prepaying | The buyer organization's wallet and its transaction history | The top-up payment |
Charges are made on your Stripe account, and ShipRev adds no application fee to them. How to connect the account is in Connect the account you are paid into.
What you sell, and changing it
You define what you sell per application, in the operator console under Products & Plans or through the Management API:
- A product is what a plan sells; an add-on product is bought on top of a base product.
- A capability is a key your code rules on and reports, counted or simply granted, with an overage policy for what happens beyond the allowance.
- A plan is a tier of a product. Its versions carry the price, the currency, the billing interval and the entitlement rules: what each capability's allowance is and whether it resets every month or never.
A published plan version is read-only. To change a price or an allowance, publish a new version: you do it in the console, not in your application's code. Existing subscribers stay on the version they subscribed to. When a payment account is connected, each published version is synced to it, and the console shows whether the sync is in progress, done or failed.
What your end users can do themselves
End users choose a plan and pay at checkout and move to another plan, in the customer portal on your brand domain or in your own pages with the React component PricingTable; they cancel in your own pages, with SubscriptionPanel or the public API. Checkout and self-service lists what each of them covers. A subscription paid through checkout stays active until the end of the period it is paid for; until then the end user can resume it in Stripe's billing portal, where they also change their payment method. A subscription without a card ends as soon as it is cancelled.
End users can also top up their organization's wallet ahead of use, and see its balance and history; see Wallet and top-ups.
Rehearse before you charge anyone
You can activate a plan for a test customer straight from the operator console, without a payment account, and see the whole chain work: Run a subscription in test mode. Once a Stripe account is connected, use Stripe's test mode first.
Where to go from here
Products, capabilities and plans
Plan versions
Payments
Checkout and self-service
Invoices and payment events
Wallet and top-ups
The endpoints are listed in the Management API and Public API references.
The objects of this product, and how they meet the other three on one buyer organization, are in How ShipRev works. The product page is Subscriptions.