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Our subscription billing system is powered by Chargebee, and Auth0 serves as our authentication and authorization system. Additionally, we implemented single sign-on (SSO) to allow users to log in to the site as well external system with one set of credentials. Here is a diagram showing roughly how that looked:

Authentication and authorization

When it comes to authentication and authorization, you want a secure, easy-to-use, and scalable solution. We considered Okta because we had previously integrated it for staff, but Auth0 is very developer friendly and geared towards applications. In addition, it’s a fantastic solution and free for up to 7k active users. Auth0 created a diagram that outlines the flow pretty well:

You can configure a lot in Auth0, but the basic setup is pretty straightforward. We created a tenant for production and one for each of the lower environments. We managed these tenants and the configuration using Pulumi which uses the Auth0 Terraform provider. If you’re a programmer and haven’t used Pulumi yet, you should give it a try. In the end, this provided us a way to manage our Auth0 tenants in code and to release changes using GitHub actions.

Auth0 provides auth components for all the primary use cases and is entirely customizable. They have a new Universal login that looks exciting, but I implemented v9 using the SDK. The difference between the classic version and v9 with the SDK was that the latter was fully customizable. I was responsible for building out the components in their entirety and using the SDK to process the form submissions.

Its most remarkable feature is its extensible authorization flow. For example, Actions allow you to customize the authentication flow. At the same time Hooks lets you customize the Auth0 behavior for specific extensibility points, such as pre-and post-registration, password changes, and phone messages.

Membership subscriptions

At the time, there were not as many subscription options as there are now. Even Shopify is getting into subscriptions rather than relying on 3rd party apps. We chose Chargebee because it was built around subscriptions and supported our needs, including support for PayPal.

I was responsible for integrating products in WordPress and the checkout flows. We didn’t manage products from WordPress, but we did use the API to fetch available products so that the product team could select products at the page level.

The checkout flow is a bit more complicated, but I used the client library to fetch the product displays using the configuration passed from the user in a global window object. Chargebee provides customizable views with their client library, and then on submit, a callback handler will tokenize the response that gets passed to the server to complete the checkout process.