Improvements to the paid subscriptions setup experience

When Buttondown first launched paid subscriptions, our fundamental architecture was all about matching and mirroring what you would see within Stripe. This was because of a few things. One, most of our customers who wanted to use paid subscriptions were doing so alongside some other form of commerce, such as a Memberful account, a Shopify store, or even their very own software product. We were maximally flexible, which enabled a lot of scalability and experimentation because as soon as Stripe added support for, say, metered billing, we could then add our own support for it.

However, as time has gone on, a couple things have changed. First, more and more users who use Buttondown to collect paid subscriptions only use Buttondown and nothing else. For these people, all that abstract flexibility is more of a curse than a blessing because we force you to understand how Stripe works in order to just collect some money for your writing. Second, Stripe as an overall product and dashboard has become more and more complicated over time. Not only has this meant that our own frontend has had to get more complicated to accommodate it, but it also means that we often spend a lot of time fielding support questions that are really Stripe support questions rather than Buttondown support questions. Lastly, we've just gotten smarter. We have a better understanding of how to structure the kinds of configurations that users want while preserving optionality for the really esoteric use cases.

Amidst all of this change, there have been two big unifying voices we hear from folks as they set up and manage their paid subscriptions. The first is that it's frankly confusing to understand what is going on, especially if you've never interacted with Stripe before. The second is that we almost bend over backwards to make it difficult to manage and see how your paid newsletter is growing over time.

So. All of this is prelude to say that whether you're checking in on your paid subscriptions or you're thinking about setting it up for the first time, the flow is about to look much cleaner. Behold!

Gone are the references to arcane settings and tables containing codes that are undecipherable without another window pulled up showing your Stripe data. We simply show you the big key metrics and then the list of options for how you set up your paid subscriptions. And then we go off and make sure all of that squares with Stripe. Notably, this does not indicate any change to how we're interacting with Stripe on the backend. Transparency and portability are still incredibly important, and literally nothing has changed in that regard. You can still view and transfer your paid subscriptions at any time.

There's one little Easter egg that we've also pushed in this change that you can see in the screenshot above. This changelog entry has gone on for long enough as is. Check back tomorrow for more information.