Subscription billing with Laravel Cashier for Mollie

Laravel Cashier provides an expressive, fluent interface to subscriptions using Mollie's billing services.

Installation

First, make sure to add the Mollie key to your .env file. You can obtain an API key from the Mollie dashboard:

Next, pull this package in using composer:

Setup

Once you have pulled in the package:

1. Run php artisan cashier:install.

2. Add these fields to your billable model's migration (typically the default "create_user_table" migration):

3. Run the migrations: php artisan migrate

4. Ensure you have properly configured the MOLLIE_KEY in your .env file. You can obtain an API key from the Mollie dashboard:

5. Prepare the configuration files:

   • configure at least one subscription plan in config/cashier_plans.php.

   • in config/cashier_coupons.php you can manage any coupons. By default an example coupon is enabled. Consider disabling it before deploying to production.

   • the base configuration is in config/cashier. Be careful while modifying this, in most cases you will not need to.

6. Prepare the billable model (typically the default Laravel User model):

   • Add the Laravel\Cashier\Billable trait.

   • Optionally, override the method mollieCustomerFields() to configure what billable model fields are stored while creating the Mollie Customer. Out of the box the mollieCustomerFields() method uses the default Laravel User model fields:

   Learn more about storing data on the Mollie Customer here.

   • Implement Laravel\Cashier\Order\Contracts\ProvidesInvoiceInformation interface. For example:
7. Schedule a periodic job to execute Cashier::run().

You can find more about scheduling jobs using Laravel here.

🎉 You're now good to go :).

Customization

If you need to change the models that are used by this package, you are able to override them like so:

Usage

Creating subscriptions

To create a subscription, first retrieve an instance of your billable model, which typically will be an instance of App\User. Once you have retrieved the model instance, you may use the newSubscription method to create the model's subscription:

If the customer already has a valid Mollie mandate, the $result will be a Subscription.

If the customer has no valid Mollie mandate yet, the $result will be a RedirectToCheckoutResponse, redirecting the customer to the Mollie checkout to make the first payment. Once the payment has been received the subscription will start.

Here's a basic controller example for creating the subscription:

In order to always enforce a redirect to the Mollie checkout page, use the newSubscriptionViaMollieCheckout method instead of newSubscription:

$redirect = $user->newSubscriptionViaMollieCheckout('main', 'premium')->create(); // make sure to configure the 'premium' plan in config/cashier.php

Coupons

Coupon handling in Cashier Mollie is designed with full flexibility in mind.

Coupons can be defined in config/cashier_coupons.php.

You can provide your own coupon handler by extending \Cashier\Discount\BaseCouponHandler.

Out of the box, a basic FixedDiscountHandler is provided.

Redeeming a coupon for an existing subscription

For redeeming a coupon for an existing subscription, use the redeemCoupon() method on the billable trait:

$user->redeemCoupon('your-coupon-code');

This will validate the coupon code and redeem it. The coupon will be applied to the upcoming Order.

Optionally, specify the subscription it should be applied to:

$user->redeemCoupon('your-coupon-code', 'main');

By default all other active redeemed coupons for the subscription will be revoked. You can prevent this by setting the $revokeOtherCoupons flag to false:

$user->redeemCoupon('your-coupon-code', 'main', false);

Checking subscription status

Once a user is subscribed to your application, you may easily check their subscription status using a variety of convenient methods. First, the subscribed method returns true if the user has an active subscription, even if the subscription is currently within its trial period:

The subscribed method also makes a great candidate for a route middleware, allowing you to filter access to routes and controllers based on the user's subscription status:

If you would like to determine if a user is still within their trial period, you may use the onTrial method. This method can be useful for displaying a warning to the user that they are still on their trial period:

The subscribedToPlan method may be used to determine if the user is subscribed to a given plan based on a configured plan. In this example, we will determine if the user's main subscription is actively subscribed to the monthly plan:

Cancelled Subscription Status

To determine if the user was once an active subscriber, but has cancelled their subscription, you may use the cancelled method:

You may also determine if a user has cancelled their subscription, but are still on their "grace period" until the subscription fully expires. For example, if a user cancels a subscription on March 5th that was originally scheduled to expire on March 10th, the user is on their "grace period" until March 10th. Note that the subscribed method still returns true during this time:

Changing Plans

After a user is subscribed to your application, they may occasionally want to change to a new subscription plan. To swap a user to a new subscription, pass the plan's identifier to the swap or swapNextCycle method:

If the user is on trial, the trial period will be maintained. Also, if a "quantity" exists for the subscription, that quantity will also be maintained.

Subscription Quantity

Sometimes subscriptions are affected by "quantity". For example, your application might charge €10 per month per user on an account. To easily increment or decrement your subscription quantity, use the incrementQuantity and decrementQuantity methods:

Alternatively, you may set a specific quantity using the updateQuantity method:

Subscription Taxes

To specify the tax percentage a user pays on a subscription, implement the taxPercentage method on your billable model, and return a numeric value between 0 and 100, with no more than 2 decimal places.

The taxPercentage method enables you to apply a tax rate on a model-by-model basis, which may be helpful for a user base that spans multiple countries and tax rates.

Syncing Tax Percentages

When changing the hard-coded value returned by the taxPercentage method, the tax settings on any existing subscriptions for the user will remain the same. If you wish to update the tax value for existing subscriptions with the returned taxPercentage value, you should call the syncTaxPercentage method on the user's subscription instance:

Subscription Anchor Date

Not (yet) implemented, but you could make this work by scheduling Cashier::run() to only execute on a specific day of the month.

Cancelling Subscriptions

To cancel a subscription, call the cancel method on the user's subscription:

or

When a subscription is cancelled, Cashier will automatically set the ends_at column in your database. This column is used to know when the subscribed method should begin returning false. For example, if a customer cancels a subscription on March 1st, but the subscription was not scheduled to end until March 5th, the subscribed method will continue to return true until March 5th.

You may determine if a user has cancelled their subscription but are still on their "grace period" using the onGracePeriod method:

Resuming Subscriptions

If a user has cancelled their subscription and you wish to resume it, use the resume method. The user must still be on their grace period in order to resume a subscription:

$user->subscription('main')->resume();

If the user cancels a subscription and then resumes that subscription before the subscription has fully expired, they will not be billed immediately. Instead, their subscription will be re-activated, and they will be billed on the original billing cycle.

Updating Customer payment mandates

Coming soon.

Subscription Trials

With Mandate Up Front

If you would like to offer trial periods to your customers while still collecting payment method information up front, you should use the trialDays method when creating your subscriptions:

This method will set the trial period ending date on the subscription record within the database.

{note} The customer will be redirected to the Mollie checkout page to make the first payment in order to register a mandate. You can modify the amount in the cashier config file.

{note} If the customer's subscription is not cancelled before the trial ending date they will be charged as soon as the trial expires, so you should be sure to notify your users of their trial ending date.

The trialUntil method allows you to provide a Carbon instance to specify when the trial period should end:

You may determine if the user is within their trial period using either the onTrial method of the user instance, or the onTrial method of the subscription instance. The two examples below are identical:

Without Mandate Up Front

If you would like to offer trial periods without collecting the user's payment method information up front, you may set the trial_ends_at column on the user record to your desired trial ending date. This is typically done during user registration:

{note} Be sure to add a date mutator for trial_ends_at to your model definition.

Cashier refers to this type of trial as a "generic trial", since it is not attached to any existing subscription. The onTrial method on the User instance will return true if the current date is not past the value of trial_ends_at:

You may also use the onGenericTrial method if you wish to know specifically that the user is within their "generic" trial period and has not created an actual subscription yet:

Once you are ready to create an actual subscription for the user, you may use the newSubscription method as usual:

Defining Webhook Event Handlers

Cashier automatically handles subscription cancellation on failed charges.

Additionally, listen for the following events (in the Laravel\Cashier\Events namespace) to add app specific behaviour:

• OrderPaymentPaid and OrderPaymentFailed
• FirstPaymentPaid and FirstPaymentFailed

One-off charges

Coming soon.

Invoices

Listen for the OrderInvoiceAvailable event (in the Laravel\Cashier\Events namespace). When a new order has been processed, you can grab the invoice by

To list invoices, access the user's orders using: $user->orders->invoices(). This includes invoices for all orders, even unprocessed or failed orders.

For list of invoices

and add this route inside web.php

Refunding Charges

Coming soon.

Customer balance

In some cases (i.e. when swapping to a cheaper plan), a customer can have overpaid. The amount that has been overpaid will be added to the customer balance.

The customer balance is automatically processed in each Order.

A separate balance is kept for each currency.

There are a few methods available to interact with the balance directly. Use these with care:

When an Order with a negative total amount due is processed, that amount is credited to the user balance. A BalanceTurnedStale event will be raised if the user has no active subscriptions at that moment. Listen for this event if you'd like to refund the remaining balance and/or want to notify the user.

Customer locale

Mollie provides a checkout tailored to the customer's locale. For this it guesses the visitor's locale. To override the default locale, configure it in config/cashier.php. This is convenient for servicing a single country.

If you're dealing with multiple locales and want to override Mollie's default behaviour, implement the getLocale() method on the billable model. A common way is to add a nullable locale field to the user table and retrieve its value:

All Cashier Events

You can listen for the following events from the Laravel\Cashier\Events namespace:

BalanceTurnedStale event

The user has a positive account balance, but no active subscriptions. Consider a refund.

CouponApplied event

A coupon was applied to an OrderItem. Note the distinction between redeeming a coupon and applying a coupon. A redeemed coupon can be applied to multiple orders. I.e. applying a 6 month discount on a monthly subscription using a single (redeemed) coupon.

FirstPaymentFailed event

The first payment (used for obtaining a mandate) has failed.

FirstPaymentPaid event

The first payment (used for obtaining a mandate) was successful.

MandateClearedFromBillable event

The mollie_mandate_id was cleared on the billable model. This happens when a payment has failed because of a invalid mandate.

MandateUpdated event

The billable model's mandate was updated. This usually means a new payment card was registered.

OrderCreated event

An Order was created.

OrderInvoiceAvailable event

An Invoice is available on the Order. Access it using $event->order->invoice().

OrderPaymentFailed event

The payment for an order has failed.

OrderPaymentFailedDueToInvalidMandate event

The payment for an order has failed due to an invalid payment mandate. This happens for example when the customer's credit card has expired.

OrderPaymentPaid event

The payment for an order was successful.

OrderProcessed event

The order has been fully processed.

SubscriptionStarted event

A new subscription was started.

SubscriptionCancelled event

The subscription was cancelled.

SubscriptionResumed event

The subscription was resumed.

SubscriptionPlanSwapped event

The subscription plan was swapped.

SubscriptionQuantityUpdated event

The subscription quantity was updated.

Metered billing with variable amounts

Some business cases will require dynamic subscription amounts.

To allow for full flexibility Cashier Mollie allows you to define your own set of Subscription OrderItem preprocessors. These preprocessors are invoked when the OrderItem is due, right before being processed into a Mollie payment.

If you're using metered billing, this is a convenient place to calculate the amount based on the usage statistics and reset any counters for the next billing cycle.

You can define the preprocessors in the cashier_plans config file.

Ok. So how does this all actually work?

This Cashier implementation schedules triggering payments from the client side, instead of relying on subscription management at Mollie. (Yes, Mollie also offers a Subscription API, but it does not support all of Cashier features, so this package provides its own subscription engine.)

From a high level perspective, this is what the process looks like:

1. A Subscription is created using the MandatePaymentSubscriptionBuilder (redirecting to Mollie's checkout to create a Mandate) or PremandatedSubscriptionBuilder (using an existing Mandate).
2. The Subscription yields a scheduled OrderItem at the beginning of each billing cycle.
3. OrderItems which are due are preprocessed and bundled into Orders whenever possible by a scheduled job (i.e. daily). This is done so your customer will receive a single payment/invoice for multiple items later on in the chain). Preprocessing the OrderItems may involve applying dynamic discounts or metered billing, depending on your configuration.
4. The Order is processed by the same scheduled job into a payment:
   • First, (if available) the customer's balance is processed in the Order.
   • If the total due is positive, a Mollie payment is incurred.
   • If the total due is 0, nothing happens.
   • If the total due is negative, the amount is added to the user's balance. If the user has no active subscriptions left, the BalanceTurnedStale event will be raised.
5. You can generate an Invoice (html/pdf) for the user.

F.A.Q. - Frequently Asked Questions

My billable model uses UUIDs, how can I get Cashier Mollie to work with this?

By default Cashier Mollie uses unsignedInteger fields for the billable model relationships. If required for your billable model, modify the cashier migrations for UUIDs:

How is prorating handled?

Cashier Mollie applies prorating by default. With prorating, customers are billed at the start of each billing cycle.

This means that when the subscription quantity is updated or is switched to another plan:

1. the billing cycle is reset
2. the customer is credited for unused time, meaning that the amount that was overpaid is added to the customer's balance.
3. a new billing cycle is started with the new subscription settings. An Order (and payment) is generated to deal with all of the previous, including applying the credited balance to the Order.

This does not apply to the $subscription->swapNextCycle('other-plan'), which simply waits for the next billing cycle to update the subscription plan. A common use case for this is downgrading the plan at the end of the billing cycle.

How can I load coupons and/or plans from database?

Because Cashier Mollie uses contracts a lot it's quite easy to extend Cashier Mollie and use your own implementations. You can load coupons/plans from database, a file or even a JSON API.

For example a simple implementation of plans from the database:

Firstly you create your own implementation of the plan repository and implement Laravel\Cashier\Plan\Contracts\PlanRepository. Implement the methods according to your needs and make sure you'll return a Laravel\Cashier\Plan\Contracts\Plan.

Then you just have to bind your implementation to the Laravel/Illuminate container by registering the binding in a service provider

Cashier Mollie will now use your implementation of the PlanRepository. For coupons this is basically the same, just make sure you implement the CouponRepository contract and bind the contract to your own implementation.

Testing

Cashier Mollie is tested against Mollie's test API.

Start with copying phpunit.xml.dist into phpunit.xml, and set these environment variables in phpunit.xml:

Mollie API test key You can obtain this key from the dashboard right after signing up.

ID of a customer with a valid directdebit mandate

Mandate's ID (of the previously mentioned customer)

ID of a successful ("paid) payment by the customer Use a 1000 EUR amount.

ID of an unsuccessful ("failed") payment by the customer

Now you can run:

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email [email protected] instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

• Mollie.com
• Sander van Hooft
• All Contributors

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.