feat: subscribe with the customer portal instead of stripe

[djaiss]

We have two huge constraints ahead of us:

• We need to move from Stripe to Paddle for our subscriptions, for tax purposes.
• Later this year we'll move to a new major version of Monica, and we'll keep the current version active as long as needed.

Because we'll have two versions of Monica, we should not manage two billing systems. I want the same subscription to work with Monica v1 and Monica v2.

The only solution for this is to move all billing logic to a dedicated app, that we call the customer portal. This customer portal will let customers purchase a licence key (with the same plans as we offer today), and we will use this licence key in both Monica v1 and Monica v2.

The best thing about moving all the billing logic from Monica to the customer portal is that we will finally be able

• to simplify the codebase by getting rid of the billing code,
• to offer Monica as a true open source product without any mention of billing anywhere.

It's a win win.

So this is how it works:

• the licence key is generated on the customer portal.
• the user has to copy the licence key on the Subscription page under the Settings page.
• to store this licence key, we've added three new columns on the Account object:
  • valid_until_at: the date the licence key should be renewed
  • licence_key: the licence key itself
  • frequency: monthly or annual plan
• The key itself is encrypted and will be decoded before being stored.
• When we paste the licence key in Monica, we need to validate it to make sure it's valid.
• The new ActivateLicenceKey service does this:
  • it sends a request to the customer portal
  • and waits for its response. If the response is 200, that means the key is valid.
• At this point, the user has a valid account and can freely play with Monica.
• Then, we've created a new job that will check all the accounts that need to be renewed once the valid_until_at field is reached. This job is called CheckLicenceKeys. It is triggered every six hours. This job checks if the key is still valid once the date is reached.

For existing customers with Stripe:

• Currently we have many subscribers with Stripe.
• Stripe has recently opened up their subscription portal that let the customers manage the credit card info and the subscription itself. And also let them see all the previous invoices. We will use this.
• Those customers have a new flag in the db called is_on_stripe on the Account table.
• When this flag is set to true, in the Settings/Subscriptions page, they have access to a new view called stripe.blade.php.
• This displays a view that tells customers to go to the stripe customer portal.
• This URL is defined in a new env variable called CUSTOMER_PORTAL_STRIPE_URL.

Drawbacks:

• we have removed all the current subscription logic from the codebase. Everything.
• we have three new env variables:
  • CUSTOMER_PORTAL_URL
  • LICENCE_KEY_ENCRYPTION_KEY
  • CUSTOMER_PORTAL_SECRET_KEY

[asbiin]

Hey, great work 👍🏽
I left some comments ...

[asbiin]

This needs to use the scheduleCommand command, see above

[djaiss]

Even if it's a not a command but a job?

[asbiin]

On some installation, schedule can't be done exactly at xx:00 hours. Laravel doesn't really support that.

[sonarcloud]

SonarCloud Quality Gate failed.   

1 Bug
0 Vulnerabilities
1 Security Hotspot
10 Code Smells

64.3% Coverage
0.0% Duplication