Tellimus

Robust subscription support for Ruby on Rails apps using Braintree, including out-of-the-box pricing pages, payment pages, and subscription management for your customers. This is a fork of Koudoku specifically for Braintree.

Installation

Include the following in your Gemfile:

    gem 'tellimus'

After running bundle install, you can run a Rails generator to do the rest. You should have a user model.

    rails g tellimus:install
    rake db:migrate

Add the following to app/views/layouts/application.html.erb before your <head> tag closes:

    <script src="https://js.braintreegateway.com/js/braintree-2.32.1.min.js"></script>
    <%= yield :tellimus %>

(This allows us to inject a Braintree <script> tag in the correct place. If you don't, the payment form will not work.)

After installing, you'll need to add some subscription plans. (You can see an explanation of each of the attributes in the table below.)

Note: You need to create the plans in your Braintree Dashboard separately.

    Plan.create({
      name: 'Personal',
      price: 10.00,
      interval: 'month',
      braintree_id: '1',
      features: ['1 Project', '1 Page', '1 User', '1 Organization'].join("\n\n"),
      display_order: 1
    })

    Plan.create({
      name: 'Team',
      highlight: true, # This highlights the plan on the pricing page.
      price: 30.00,
      interval: 'month',
      braintree_id: '2',
      features: ['3 Projects', '3 Pages', '3 Users', '3 Organizations'].join("\n\n"),
      display_order: 2
    })

    Plan.create({
      name: 'Enterprise',
      price: 100.00,
      interval: 'month',
      braintree_id: '3',
      features: ['10 Projects', '10 Pages', '10 Users', '10 Organizations'].join("\n\n"),
      display_order: 3
    })

To help you understand the attributes:

Attribute	Type	Function
`name`	string	Name for the plan to be presented to customers.
`price`	float	Price per billing cycle.
`interval`	string	Optional. What is the billing cycle? Valid options are `month`, `year`, `week`, `3-month`, `6-month`. Defaults to `month`.
`braintree_id`	string	The Plan ID in Braintree.
`features`	string	A list of features. Supports Markdown syntax.
`display_order`	integer	Order in which to display plans.
`highlight`	boolean	Optional. Whether to highlight the plan on the pricing page.

The only view installed locally into your app by default is the koudoku/subscriptions/_social_proof.html.erb partial which is displayed alongside the pricing table. It's designed as a placeholder where you can provide quotes about your product from customers that could positively influence your visitors.

Configuring Braintree API Keys

You can supply your publishable and secret API keys in config/initializers/tellimus.rb. However, by default it will use the BRAINTREE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY and BRAINTREE_SECRET_KEY shell environment variables. This encourages people to keep these API keys out of version control. You may want to rename these environment variables to be more application specific.

In a bash shell, you can set them in ~/.bash_profile like so:

    export BRAINTREE_PUBLIC_KEY=pk_0CJwDH9sdh98f79FDHDOjdiOxQob0
    export BRAINTREE_PRIVATE_KEY=sk_0CJwFDIUshdfh97JDJOjZ5OIDjOCH
    export BRAINTREE_MERCHANT_ID=2dj90d2j3dhnxn2
    export BRAINTREE_ENVIRONMENT="sandbox"

(Reload your terminal for these settings to take effect.)

User-Facing Subscription Management

By default a pricing_path route is defined which you can link to in order to show visitors a pricing table. If a user is signed in, this pricing table will take into account their current plan. For example, you can link to this page like so:

    <%= link_to 'Pricing', main_app.pricing_path %>

(Note: Tellimus uses the application layout, so it's important that application paths referenced in that layout are prefixed with "main_app." like you see above or Rails will try to look the paths up in the Tellimus engine instead of your application.)

Existing users can view available plans, select a plan, enter credit card details, review their subscription, change plans, and cancel at the following route:

    tellimus.owner_subscriptions_path(@user)

In these paths, owner refers to User by default, or whatever model has been configured to be the owner of the Subscription model.

A number of views are provided by default. To customize the views, use the following generator:

    rails g tellimus:views

Pricing Table

Tellimus ships with a stock pricing table. By default it depends on Twitter Bootstrap, but also has some additional styles required. In order to import these styles, add the following to your app/assets/stylesheets/application.css:

    *= require 'tellimus/pricing-table'

Or, if you've replaced your application.css with an application.scss (like I always do):

    @import "tellimus/pricing-table"

Implementing Logging, Notifications, etc.

The included module defines the following empty "template methods" which you're able to provide an implementation for in Subscription:

prepare_for_plan_change
prepare_for_new_subscription
prepare_for_upgrade
prepare_for_downgrade
prepare_for_cancelation
prepare_for_card_update
finalize_plan_change!
finalize_new_subscription!
finalize_upgrade!
finalize_downgrade!
finalize_cancelation!
finalize_card_update!
card_was_declined

Be sure to include a call to super in each of your implementations, especially if you're using multiple concerns to break all this logic into smaller pieces.

Between prepare_for_* and finalize_*, so far I've used finalize_* almost exclusively. The difference is that prepare_for_* runs before we settle things with Stripe, and finalize_* runs after everything is settled in Stripe. For that reason, please be sure not to implement anything in finalize_* implementations that might cause issues with ActiveRecord saving the updated state of the subscription.

tellimus