Spike: membership sign up and management

[javawizard]

The only thing keeping MSL's WordPress instance (which costs a pretty penny to run, more than Heimdall itself) around now that the website has been moved to makesaltlake/public_website is that it handles member signup and membership changes (like changing plans and adding card info). That's a lot of money to spend just for that.

I had a look around some time ago at other self-service recurring subscription signup and management portals and all of the options I found were even more expensive at our scale (in no small part because they tend to bill on revenue percentage) or missing features we need (like a way to log in and switch between plans).

So, given all of that and given that a lot of neat possibilities open up if members are able to sign into Heimdall (like certifiers being able to enter certifications themselves instead of Jen having to enter them manually, members being able to purchase gift cards, and Heimdall sending emails to all members certified in a given area when an access code changes), I'd like to try writing a membership signup and management system into Heimdall.

The way I'm thinking that would go down is as follows:

• Write a prototype membership signup form. It should accept all the same fields our current one does and should embed a Stripe credit card field to accept payment. It should create Stripe subscriptions but not do any other functionally useful stuff. It should also use a hardcoded plan.
• Enhance it to use multiple plans - probably hardcode them at first, but perhaps add a DB model where plans can be configured. Whether or not there should be a page to pick between plans is an open question; it may be fine to have the plan chooser live in makesaltlake/public_website and link to a page specific to each plan.
• Enhance it to support coupons. This will require investigating whether Stripe's built-in coupon support is sufficient for our needs (it wasn't for MemberPress, the WordPress plugin we currently use to manage memberships, so they implemented their own coupon system that creates plans from scratch for each new signup; it's possible we may have to do the same).
• See if anything else is missing from the existing membership signup system feature wise
• Ask MSL staff how they want the "where did you hear about us" field to work and if there's any other data they'd want to collect from new members going forward
• Wire up email sending to Heimdall in production using something like Sendgrid, SparkPost, or Mailgun. Now that SparkPost no longer offers their 10,000 emails/month free plan, MailGun's flex plan ($0.80/1,000 emails sent) is probably the cheapest for us considering our low volume (which I imagine will be one email receipt per month to each member, and possibly not even that since Stripe also sends receipts on our behalf).
• Configure the signup form to create users in Heindall on signup and send an email with a link to set up the user's account when created. It should only send that email when a user signs up through the form, not when a user is manually created or automatically created by signing up through the old form. There should, however, be a way to send it manually from the admin console, and it would be ideal if an already-existing user who signed up again through the form (perhaps because they cancelled a while back and are signing up again) got the email as well if they hadn't yet set a password.
• Build a page where an authenticated user can update their Stripe card info on file. It will need to do something useful if they don't have a corresponding Stripe customer yet. It will also need to do something useful if they have multiple Customers in Stripe (and we should see if and how many of such users exist).
• Build a page where an authenticated user can change their plan. We'll need to think through whether they should be able to apply a coupon when they do that (and how to limit most coupons from being used more than once by the same user).
• Build some sort of way for existing members to sign up for a Heimdall account and manage their membership there
• Do a pass through to see if there are any other member management features we need for round 1 that are missing and implement them.
• Try having a few new members we talk to on tours sign up through the new system and see how it goes for them. Make any changes needed based on their feedback.
• (Possibly consider A/B testing the new signup form vs the old one to make sure there isn't a notable decrease in conversions, and make any changes needed to address that if there is)
• Roll out the new system to all new member signups
• Put a note on the old WordPress system directing users to the new system (but leave the old one running for a bit)
• Announce the new system to the membership somewhere
• After some time, sunset the old system and possibly consider moving/aliasing Heimdall to membership.makesaltlake.org

[javawizard]

One important note: however member signup and management is implemented, it needs to be easy to replace the system with an off-the-shelf system on short notice should all of us developers get hit by a bus (even if it costs more than we'd like). The last thing we want to do is get into a situation where years down the road Heimdall dies, no-one's around to fix it, and we can't sign members up as a result.