How or which Payment system do I need to use for Subscription services which are mentioned as below , Stripe Or Google's In-App Billing?

Question

I'm currently very much confused about with which subscription service to use between any Third-party or Google's In-App billing system.

Let me explain first , I have an app which is providing service to Landlord for Posting their vacant Properties where we are providing free trial 60 Days for full app features & after trial expires I would like to add Subscription Plans as below:

• Silver: Less than 50 units (monthly or yearly)
• Gold: Less than 51 - 100 units (monthly or yearly)
• Platinum 100 and up units (monthly or yearly)

Now I'm exploring options to include to implement this subscription features & found that Stripe would be a good option for me but soon I find out about in-app purchases guidelines where they mentioned that In-app purchases must use Google Play’s payment system & also mentioned , examples of products not currently supported by Google Play In-app Billing:

So , basically there are two questions from my side :

1. Can I use other payment system or should I need to use Google's Play Billing system ?
2. For Google's Play system , How can I divide or how many subscriptions items will be there for above subscriptions plans?

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

You can use both services Stripe and Google IAP(In App Purchases) or just 1 of them.

I suggest that you go with Google IAP since you do not have BE(BackEnd) and as I understand would be hard for you to maintain card numbers and everything.

Google IAP provides an SDK so that you can manage subscriptions on the Play Developers Console yourself. It also provides sandbox environment so that you can test it but also Stripe does that.

Here are some references:

https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_subscriptions https://developer.android.com/google/play/billing/billing_overview.html

but I guess you have gone through them already. In the company that I previously worked on we were developing a project with pretty much the plans you described above and we used Google IAP and Apple IAP(for iOS/tvOS) without any problems. Furthermore we were able to query Google or Apple for previous subscriptions and let customers actually renew them instead of buying new ones.

As you mentioned the leasers/landlords will not be able to pay electronic bills with Google IAP but you can integrate Paypal/Stripe/BrainTree/WePay or any other alternatives for that.

Having mentioned that I would like to answer your questions now:

1) Yes you can use Stripe instead of Google IAP 2) You can divide subscriptions and you can manage them in your Google Developers Console at https://play.google.com/apps/publish/. However that can happen after you uploaded an .apk in console with in-app-billing dependencies and also permissions.

Hope it helps!!!

Answer 2

Your particular scenario is a bit of a grey area.

As a precedent the Autotrader app in the UK is using direct credit card billing in-app and this is a similar service to yours - i.e they are selling listings.

This seems correct to me because in app billing is designed to be used for digital content to be consumed in the app - not for real world services. Google may even reject your app for it.

In this case my advice would actually be to use Stripe or some other billing platform.

As for your billing model - it doesn't really fit the subscription model. I don't know specifically about Stripe but with Google you can't have a subscription AND a limit on items in the way you describe. So you would have to manage the listing limits yourself on your own backend.

There are some edge cases though - what happens if you use all of your 50 listings within the month? Do I have to buy another whole subscription?

The most suitable payment model I can see for you is Metered Billing from stripe - essentially pay as you go.