Normally when I sell advertising spots on Laravel News it’s a one off purchase so I’ve been using Quickbooks Invoices for it. This works okay but it doesn’t support recurrning payments. So I have to regenerate an invoice every month for those customers. It’s not an idea workflow but it works.
Today I had a request from a customer that wanted this payment to be automatic and my first thought was that I would need to integrate something like Laravel Cashier which is overkill for a single customer. After doing some research and talking with some friends I was pointed in the direction of Stripe Checkout.
In about 10 minutes I had it all setup and I could sent the customer a link to initiate the flow and make the payment. Thinking back to how hard this would have been before Stripe makes me really appreciate the tools we have available to us now.
From this I do have two thoughts. The first, is always try to find the simplest solution to a problem you are facing, and the second is to keep your eyes open on new tools. I had heard of Stripe Checkout before but I didn’t see the value in it so didn’t pay it much attention. Now that I needed it I’m thankful I had a friend that could point me back to it. Without that I might have wasted an entire Saturday building a complicated setup.
Eric L. Barnes 