
Explore a tech stack independent approach to integrating payments in your SaaS web app, automate the full sales process—from plan selection and credit card payment to delivery and invoicing.
Outline covers security first and then payment providers, gateways, software as a service integration options, web hooks, database models, testing, UX, provisioning, metered billing, invoicing, proration, dunning, and legal topics.
Ensure PCI DSS compliance by never handling card data directly and outsourcing storage and processing to payment services, using the SAQ for streamlined security assessment.
Understand payment methods, gateways, and service providers, and learn how to choose and integrate them in your SaaS app. Compare pricing and features across PSPs, gateways, and methods.
Explore payment integration approaches for SaaS apps, from api-only to components-based and hosted pages, and learn PCI compliance, tokens, and webhooks for a secure, customizable checkout.
Process payment webhooks to synchronize your SaaS state with the payment service provider, validating cryptographic signatures and handling events like checkout and subscription changes.
Adapt your software as a service database to synchronize data from the payment service provider, mapping customers, charges, invoices, plans, subscriptions, licenses and organizations for scalable access control.
Learn to use a payment service provider's testing system for local development, switch credentials from live to testing, and apply secure handling of secrets, dummy data, and web hooks.
Ensure a safe, clear payment UX by precise communication, minimizing fear, and offering warranties, refunds, and support. Design flows for coupons, billing intervals, upgrades, cancellations, invoices, and multiple payment methods.
Provision and deliver services after an order using payment provider web hooks to synchronize state, manage licenses, and respond to subscription, payments, or cancellation events.
Learn metered billing that charges users by usage, with examples like per gigabyte or compute time, and implement it via api usage data or draft invoices with custom items.
Implement compliant invoicing for your saas by using a payment service provider's invoicing tools, ensuring immutable invoices, correct invoice numbers, tax rates and dates, and proper archiving.
Determine and apply accurate tax rates and VAT rules for SaaS customers by country and status, including EU and non-EU cases, with validation and user-friendly UX.
Master proration by calculating pricing for days before and after a plan change within the billing cycle, then adjust the next invoice to keep monthly billing fixed.
Dunning automates payment collection by sending targeted reminder emails when cards fail or funds are insufficient, often handled automatically by payment providers for a set-and-forget workflow.
Learn the key legal and compliance aspects for integrating payments into your SaaS web app, including EU regulations like GDPR and PCI, two-factor authentication, and trial-period notifications.
Save money, time, and nerves when integrating online payment processing into your web app. This course helps you understand the architecture and workflows behind modern SaaS payment so you can efficiently decide, plan, manage and implement a solution that fits your requirements best.
Efficiently integrate state-of-the-art payment methods into your SaaS web application.
covers different implementation approaches
vendor and technology agnostic
includes payment user experience aspects
complex topics visually explained
covers legal regulations
Understand the big picture to make the actual integration easy and efficient
Integrating payment is so much more than copying and pasting some code snippets from your payment service provider documentation. A payment system must be securely integrated into your development environment, your testing infrastructure, and your database. Your users will become customers when they pay and they have expectations of user experience and security when it comes to payment. Last but not least you need to be aware of the legal requirements that are a lot stricter when doing online payments.
It’s a lot, but don’t panic. This is exactly the course that covers all these topics and gives you tips and best practices from implementing SaaS payment systems for over 15 years.
We will start with the fundamentals of how online payment works. We’ll cover all important terms and definitions. So no matter if you are coding the implementation yourself or managing the payment integration project or leading the development team, after this course you know how everything works and can make elaborate decisions about the integration.
We are not providing a copy & paste tutorial in this course, this is about the bigger picture to make sure you don’t forget to address the important parts when doing the payment integration. It helps you to choose the right payment service provider (from where you finally get some copy & paste code snippets) and how you need to prepare your existing system to fulfill all the technical and legal requirements.
Because payment integration has a high demand for security all payment service providers offer similar approaches to integration. We will cover the different approaches with all the pros and cons to give you the know-how to choose the payment provider that really fits your needs. This course is completely vendor and technology agnostic so all the learned approaches can easily be applied to your existing tech stack and the payment service provider of your choice.
Having covered the technical aspects of the integration we will also talk about all the areas a customer is expecting from a paid service in terms of user experience. So that the flow from a free user to a paid customer is as seamless and intuitive as possible which immediately leads to higher conversion rates.
Finally, we will talk about legal regulations, how they affect the payment process, what you need to be aware of, and what you should check with your lawyer and/or accountant. In terms of legal regulations, we focus on the European Union.
By the end of this course, you will have a deep understanding of how the different parts of your SaaS need to integrate and connect with a third-party payment service provider to provide a great UX and secure payment processes. You have the ability to choose a fitting payment service and integration approach based on your requirements. You know the potential obstacles and how best to overcome them. You see and understand the big picture of online payment and know the purpose of each aspect of the integration architecture. With this knowledge, you are well equipped to manage or implement a payment integration project yourself.
About the Lecturer
Christian Haintz has been writing code for over 20 years. He has co-founded more than one startup and created several SaaS products that are being used in over 100 countries. Sharing his insights isn’t new to him either because he has already taught at Universities and mentorship programs.