We want to get users into your product as fast as possible so they see the value of your service and turn into happy paying customers. The Servicebot on-boarding flow is meant to reduce friction for your users so you increase your conversion rate. Whether you offer a free trial, ask for CC up front, or run a freemium model, Servicebot has you covered.

Overview

A common mistake we've seen amongst SaaS founders, developers, and CTOs of SaaS startups is the lack of knowledge around basics of recurring billing. SaaS billing has a strong connection to user registration and on-boarding flow of your application. From the time the user visits your website, to when they're paying you every month for your product, you need to understand their journey.

Are you providing freemium accounts? Free trials? or simply charging your customers upon registration? Depending on your pricing strategy you will have a different billing flow.

A typical SaaS user registration model

The first step of setting up your SaaS billing is to understand how you are planning on charging your customers and your pricing strategy.

What Is Your Pricing Strategy?

As obvious as it may be, you must know your pricing strategy before building your billing solution. Be familiar with the 3 common pricing strategies, flat subscription, unit-based pricing, and usage-based pricing.

Example of a Flat + Unit-based pricing rendered by Servicebot plan picker

Servicebot supports all complex pricing strategies supported by Stripe Billing.

What is your registration Strategy?

If you are running a SaaS product, most likely you have a user registration process. This is the process you use to onboard your users and give them access to your application. In many cases you'll need to create user's billing profiles in Stripe during on-boarding. Depending on your on-boarding strategy, your user billing registration flow might look different. You must know which of the following strategies you fall under:

Freemium Accounts

If you have a free plan, then you are on-boarding your users to your application before they pay you. With the freemium models you don't have to create any billing profiles for your users until they are ready to pay you. Just give your users access to your SaaS, and redirect them to a page with Servicebot Subscription Management Portal (That you'll be embedding soon) and our embedded portal will create their billing profiles in Stripe for you after they select a new paid plan.

Free Trial Accounts

If you are starting off your users with some free trial days, then you must also have their customer object and subscription created in Stripe at the time of signing up. You have two options. You can use the Servicebot Pricing Page & Signup Form with your user signup form, or simply use Stripe's APIs. You can make two API calls to Stripe to create the customer object and then subscribe the customer to a new subscription with a free trial.

Paid Upfront

If you are asking your customers to pay you upfront prior to getting access to your product, then you have a few options. You can use the Servicebot Pricing Page & Signup Form with your user signup form, you can simply use Stripe's APIs, or you can use Stripe Hosted Payment Pages.

What are you using for user management?

Most SaaS products have some kind of user management system. This is how you will register and authenticate users into your application. Servicebot works with any Auth system, custom or 3rd party.

We use user's email to validate your user's identity prior to showing them the billing data. Servicebot Subscription Management Portal needs user emails to retrieve their subscription info from your Stripe account and show them their subscription overview.

You are ready to setup your Subscription Portal

It is now time to add your Servicebot Subscription Management Portal to your application. This is a simple embeddable portal that will allow your customers to manage theirs subscription, upgrade/downgrade between plans, update credit card, and download invoices. No coding is required on your end.