Hi everyone! It’s been a while, as I’ve been busy with my newest startup, Qoins, but I’ve released a couple of new courses on CodeLess Academy!
The one I’d like to highlight today is the Stripe+Bubble course. Most Bubblers want to use Stripe as a way to accept payment with their app. Many also run into issues with not understanding how to set up Bubble’s integrations, or needing to accomplish things beyond the built-in functions. That’s where this course comes in.
We’ll cover:
Accepting payments from debit/credit cards and bank accounts (ACH/Electronic check)
Taking a fee from payments to other users
Controlling when payments are sent out to users that are sellers with an API call (Gives you more control of when money gets paid out. Think Uber/Lyft sending out weekly payments.)
Setting up subscriptions
Creating invoice items and saving payments for later
Tips and suggestions for setting up your dashboard and making sure that you’re reading up on financial regulations
The price of this course is $14 USD, and once you purchase it, you’ll own it forever. You’ll also get a pre-filled template of API calls for Stripe. All you’ll need to do is plug in your credentials, and you’ll be ready to go! The price also includes any updates, which will include even more functionality for what you can do with Stripe!
I’m so excited to see this! Can you clarify as this is right in the realm of my final step before launch… is it based on a date that is set via a workflow in Bubble or is it a flat/set timeframe?
We cover the API call that you would use to initiate the payment to a user. You can definitely set something up to run on its own automatically though!
Something that I use in another app that I made is Schedule by Zapier. This allows you to set how often you want an event to happen, such as running an API workflow from your Bubble app. In my app, this is used to run a set of workflows that happen every night.
So, you could definitely set something up like that to pay out money every week, or however often you need. I use Zapier’s free tier and it gets the job done too!
Now that you mention it, I’ll probably add another free lesson soon on setting up a recurring workflow like that. Most likely sometime next week.
Just bought your Stripe course, but it would seem my permissions aren’t updating as I’m only getting the intro video. When I try to move to the next lesson, I get redirected back to the intro page. Can you check out for me, please? Looking forward to seeing your approach!
Hey Nate,
Great course. Thanks for taking the time to put this together.
Couple of questions now that I’ve watched the videos:
The video shows the “Add Payment Source to Customer” call, but I didn’t find this one in your set of templates. Was this replaced by the “Replace Customer Payment Source” call? Is that to keep things simple by limiting customer payment sources to a single, default source?
Have you used the managed or stand alone accounts that appear to allow preregistering a seller account for a user (that can receive payments) that they can claim/authorize later?
I noticed that Stripe integrates with Plaid for instant bank account verification. Stripe - Plaid Integration
Have you used this feature? If so, I’d love to see another video discussing it.
To answer your first question @nathan.d.stevens, you are correct. I consolidated the two calls into one “Replace Customer Payment Source” call. Most people taking this course won’t really have a use case to link multiple cards, so I just simplified it. I’ll most likely add even more in-depth calls at some point, or even create a plugin to simplify the process.
You can actually add multiple payment sources by using the same call, by just adding the /sources endpoint after the customer ID.
This course doesn’t currently cover managed accounts, but I’ve definitely played around with the functionality. I’ll most likely either do another video or plugin regarding those when I can.
I’m also super familiar with using Plaid and Stripe’s partnership for instant account verification. I use Plaid in my startup Qoins, and we used Stripe originally as our payment processor.
Between being super busy with our Bubble-built startup’s growth, private Skype lessons with others, and more, there’s still a lot in the pipeline to push out on the site. I should be reaching a point in the next few weeks where I can put out more content, so stay tuned for that!
Ok. That’s what I thought. That makes sense. I found the /sources endpoint in the Stripe documentation.
The scenario I’m dealing with is having Stripe accounts with a credit card AND a bank account. The issue I seem to be having using the “Replace Customer Payment Source” was when adding a bank account to a Stripe account that already had a credit card associated. With this call, the bank account would overwrite the original CC.
I’m very interested in more info on the Plaid implementation. I’ll keep my eyes open for an update on that but may end up scheduling a session with you to discuss it.
Ok. I figured out how to add a managed account, but then realized that the managed account cannot be a “source”. It can only be a destination. I figured this out when trying to add a credit card with a generated token that kept being rejected because a “currency” wasn’t specified.
It seems to me that I will need to create two separate types of Stripe accounts for my customers:
1 managed account where they can link a bank account to receive funds “a destination” and
1 customer account that they can link an external payment method to “a source”.
Does this seem correct or is there a way to link a managed account to a customer account so that a single Stripe ID can be maintained in the Bubble database for handling transactions?
It seems that I will need to maintain a Stripe customer ID as a source AND a Stripe Managed account as a destination. Is that what you have found?
Speaking from a financial sector perspective, the KYC (Know Your Customer) laws require you to collect more information to send someone deposits to their bank account (for tax purposes, etc.) than it does to charge their credit card.
Essentially, a managed account is the same as a standalone account that the user never sees. So imagine it as creating the same kind of Stripe account that you have, for another user. Since you can’t link a credit/debit card for use to your master Stripe account, I’d imagine you wouldn’t be able to for managed accounts. (I could be wrong, but I haven’t seen anything about doing that in the docs.)
Also, if you need to schedule a session before I get the Plaid stuff up, feel free to reach out at nate@codelessacademy.com. Just finished pushing out my startup’s Android app this week, so hoping to start updating/adding new lessons next week.
My understanding of Plaid is that it is used for verification purposes and monitoring balances on bank accounts among other things. However, it does NOT handle making transfers to/from those bank accounts.
@natedogg Very interesting. Care to elaborate on your experience with Dwolla? We’ve had extensive conversations with them and they have some pretty nice features. Downside for us is that Dwolla is strictly limited to ACH which would mean our users couldn’t pay with a credit card unless we ran a second payment processor in parallel. Have you encountered the same thing or did you work out another solution?
Have you noticed much difference in the on-boarding success rate with Dwolla vs credit cards?
Was the primary motivation to switch the reduced processing fees associated with ACH or have you noticed other benefits?
Does Dwolla integrate with Bubble? Is there an API already in place?
Do you find Dwolla less expensive than Stripe for ACH payments when you were first starting up?
We consider using Dwolla over a year ago to process rent via ACH for some rentals, but their whitelabel platform had a pretty high flat monthly fee (I think $3k or $5k) which was too high for us. Now deciding between Dwolla, Stripe or home build for a new product, so any insight you have would be helpful.
