How to let users manage Stripe subscriptions created with Gravity Forms

I have been doing some research for a client about what it would take to allow people who have signed up for recurring donations to be able to manage their donations (cancel, change amount, or update credit card details). And I found a solution that I wanted to share, for anyone looking for ways to solve this same problem!

If you use or develop with Gravity Forms, you know how easy it is to set up Stripe for one-time or recurring payments. By integrating Stripe in your form, donors/subscribers have been able to sign up for one-time or recurring payments without going through the hassle of creating a user account. This has been great in its own way, since it gets people in and out and signed up with almost no complications or obstacles. A simple checkbox and tweak to your Stripe feed can easily convert these one-time payments to monthly or yearly subscribers with almost no effort.

The hard part comes in a year or two when people need to update their billing information, or cancel/modify that recurring subscription. The built-in Gravity Forms Stripe Addon does not have a way to do this, so it requires members to contact the site owner and request they cancel the subscription for them. This is not only a hassle, but also very unsettling for the user who is going to sweat a little if the site owner doesn’t respond!

Luckily there is a (somewhat new? or just new to me?) plugin called GravityStripe which does exactly this. I’ve done some experimentation (using my own website as a guinea pig) and I am happy to say it does work!

Past payments:

Since up until now, past subscribers have been able to sign up for recurring payments without creating a user account, we have to do some preparation work in the back end first to get this working for them. Specifically…

1. We have to create a WordPress user account for each recurring donor.
2. Then, we need to go into each form entry (just the entries for recurring payments) and assign that subscription to the appropriate user.

These steps are relatively easy, but repetitive, depending on how many subscribers there are. If you have a ton of past subscribers, then this would probably be best be hired out to one of our contractors overseas (lower hourly rates, good for simple repetitive work)

Future payments:

The ideal way this plugin is meant to be used would be to create and assign these user accounts at the time of donation. For this, you’d use the Gravity Forms User Registration addon. Doing this captures new users going forward. (whether the user bothers to use it or not, it’s there if they ever ask how to update their credit card or cancel their subscriptions). And this part just takes a few minutes to set up.

If you are an existing WizzyWig client, let me know if you are interested in adding this feature to your site! You’d just have to pay for our time to set it up for past and future donors, and purchase the single site GravityStripe Pro license which is $36 per year. https://www.gravitystripe.com/pricing