About SubTru

Back when I was just a young lad, I accidentally stole $39.99 from one of my customers. For some context, whenever a customer purchases or changes a subscription, providers like Stripe, the Apple App Store, or Google Play send out at least one event to an endpoint that you've configured. The type and format of these events differ between providers, but they generally provide data that you can use to keep your customer subscription records up to date. Processing these subscription events can get pretty complicated, even when using just a single provider, which is why so many people use services like RevenueCat to handle that. To avoid RevenueCat's pricing model and to keep more control over my codebase, I decided to build subscription event handling and customer management all by my naive self. I had no idea how complicated and time-consuming this would be. After about two months of pain, I was finally done building, or so I thought.

I launched my new subscriptions, and later that day, one of my users purchased one for $39.99/mo. After seeing I had a new customer, I excitedly checked my database to ensure their subscription record had updated correctly, since that's what my app would use to grant them access. I inspected the record, but for some reason, it was in fact not granting them access. Something had gone wrong with processing the subscription event after the purchase. That's when it dawned on me that I had just charged my customer for nothing. I had essentially just stolen from my customer. I started to feel sick to my stomach. I felt horrible.

I scrambled to find the root cause of the issue. I still remember the feelings of dread and disappointment in myself as I looked for clues. A customer had put their trust in my product, and I failed them. Fortunately, I was quickly able to identify and fix the issue. It was just a tiny provider-specific misconfiguration, but that's all it took for things to break. In that moment, I decided I never wanted something like this to happen again, to me, to any other developer, and especially to any customer. That's when I got the idea for SubTru.

SubTru is the gold standard for customer subscription handling. That is my vision. Here's what I mean by that and how the open source community makes it possible.

To be the gold standard, SubTru must be reliable. Customers should always get what they paid for, and developers shouldn't have to worry about whether or not things will work. I believe there is no better way to build a reliable product than through the open source community. There are so many incredible open source developers who know far more than I do about all sorts of things. I believe that diverse range of skills and experience is the backbone of SubTru and is what creates a reliable product.

SubTru must also have a great developer experience when building and using the product. The collaborative, open source nature of SubTru aligns very well with a great developer experience. Any developer can easily self-host the SubTru API for free, and SubTru Cloud customers can see exactly what code is running behind the scenes. Since SubTru operates as an API running on its own server, it is lightweight and minimally invasive when integrating with your codebase. This allows you to add, remove, or replace your SubTru integration in only a few lines of code. SubTru doesn't try to lock you in. Additionally, I believe the ability to add reliable subscription handling infrastructure to your product shouldn't be gatekept. Everyone is free to use, modify, and redistribute the SubTru source code. I believe happy developers lead to a reliable product, which leads to a great customer experience.

I'm excited to see where the open source community takes this project. All contributions are welcome, no matter how small. Thank you so much for your support!