Question
What's your subscription stack, the tools you'd use to start a subscription business?
Subscriptions are everywhere, the core business model behind everything from new media and entertainment to the software that powers our businesses. And they're easier than ever to start, with tools to manage subscriptions in the App Store, WordPress, Ghost, Substack, Squarespace, Stripe, PayPal, and much more.
So what's the best way to run subscriptions?
If you have a subscription-powered business, or plan to build one, what are the best tools to charge customers regularly, manage subscriptions, track revenue, reduce churn, and more?
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A company I find interesting in this space is Quorum. You can setup group chats to coach and help people and charge a recurring fee every month: https://quorum.chat/
Very cool, thanks for sharing @WebDev! Are you using Ghost's CMS to both host your content and customer subscription management? If so, how have you found Ghost's subscription tools so far?
Also thanks for sharing LogRocket—I was just looking around for FullStory alternatives and looks like that's the closest I'd seen yet. What made you choose LogRocket?
I manage my subscriptions using Stripe directly within my own app. Ghost is not in my main site flow, I'm primarily an app developer not a publisher.
I use it as a relatively simple publishing tool and CMS for the companion content so I didn't have to think about it. So it contains news snippets about updates and changes, occasionally I'll make longer posts about items that may interest the user base. Ghost manages that and pushes the content out to associated twitter and facebook accounts.
LogRocket really helps with webapp development and the free tier is plenty big to get off the ground. It's like have the dev tools open on the user's system and I don't have to create integration points for a logger myself.
Only about 35% of my customers on this product are on subscription plans - I also offer one-time purchase pricing which the majority prefer.
I haven't reviewed any 3rd party subscription tools. To date Stripe has had all the API access I've needed to automate the process to my satisfaction.
As I move to get into the Apple store this may change.
Looking for a better way to plan remote meetings across time zones, and keep up with events. What software is doing that best today?
Interesting, that is a unique subscription model @JoParisot! Feels like that could cover the needs of a lot of consulting-type businesses where right now you might make a PayPal invoice the do a Zoom call, and here it'd be all-in-one.
Much more for personalized subscriptions than most of the other players in the subscription space which tend to be focused on subscriptions to content that's shared with all paying members.