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General Discussion

Posted by gabriel siqueira
gabriel siqueira
7,405 Points

Videos on how to build a subscription website?

Hey guys, I'm building a subscription website for a fitness company. They will charge users to access the website content, interactions with some features like counting calories, inputing weight and information, uploading pictures, etc.

Is there any course related with this subscription model on treehouse that could help me out?

Thanks,

Gabe

2 Answers

Jacob Mishkin
Jacob Mishkin
23,118 Points
Jacob Mishkin
Jacob Mishkin
23,118 Points

First, is there going to be an IOS or android version? There are several courses to do this, database fundamentals, to create an MySQL database to store the data the users are inputting. OOP PHP to create user accounts as objects, security for transactions, uploading pictures, ect. JS for interactivity.

Also learning WordPress would be a good idea as well.

gabriel siqueira
gabriel siqueira
7,405 Points

Thanks Jacob,

First it will just be a website. I'm just building the minimum viable product, we'll probably hire some programmers after it is a proven concept. I've been researching and WordPress seems to be the best options with some useful plugins.

Jacob Mishkin
Jacob Mishkin
23,118 Points

Yeah WP is a great option, but hire programmers who know WP/PHP, don't rely just on plugins. Get people who know what's up, and who can customize things like woo commerce, create a custom theme, ect.

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,149 Points

I built a subscription based Ruby on Rails site, and used https://stripe.com/ to provide the functionality of managing the subscriptions.

Yes, Stripe takes a cut for each sale, but it's worth it. With Stripe and subscriptions, Stripe keeps the master record. When users take steps to modify their subscriptions, you pass that info along to stripe via their standard API. When stripe does something for you, they send a webhook to a URL you define, where you can than do various things to sync your application with stripe. It makes it very easy to keep your app, and stripe in sync, and the customer never knows the subscription logic actually happens on stripe. Also with stripe, you don't actually deal with users credit cards, so you remove yourself from a lot of the liability and regulations of that; Stripe takes on that responsibility.

Stripe has API's for many languages, I just was using RoR. If you know core programming principals in the language of your choice, know how to interface with a standard API, and understand how to receive and process webhooks, it's pretty easy. It's maybe a 5-25 hour job depending on knowledge.

That's my opinion.