Creating a subscription based website in ASP.NET

Question

I'd like to update my website to make it subscription based. It's a ASP.NET Web forms project. I am looking for the following functionality:

1. Ability to have users sign up for different plans (Gold, Premium etc)
2. Ability to have users upgrade / downgrade to and from plans
3. Ability to hook this up to a Payment processor
4. Ability to have a credit based system (User buys x credits for $y) as an alternative to plans in (1)

Most of this functionality (if not all) is supported by a large number of websites which makes me think I can leverage on an existing framework instead of re-inventing the wheel.

Need more opinions. Thanks for reading.

Answer 1

For the Web forms project template, you will need to implement the Web Profile Builder wrapper class to enable access to user profiles. This can be implemented with PayPal. I've done something similar here, hopefully this will point you in the right direction :-)

Answer 2

Check out this sample project that demonstrates building a subscription service into asp.net. It is available on MSDN and is called Freemium Web Application Toolkit

Answer 3

Instead of creating all the necessary logic yourself you could use a subscription payment service like chargify.

This has following advantages:

• you could start immediately with hosted payment pages
• you can accept credit cards for recurring payments without needing them to signup somewhere else (as I've stated PayPal sadly does not provide this option)
• you would not have to deal with all the subscription related programming, like sending out emails, handling charge backs and so on

There are plenty of other subscription payment collection services out there. The once I know are:

• recurly
• cheddargetter