In this episode, we get hands-on with setting up your subscription plans in Stripe and connecting them to your Laravel app using Cashier. First, we jump into the Stripe dashboard—if you haven’t created a free Stripe account yet, you’ll need one! We quickly tour the Developer section, check that you’re in test mode, and find where to grab your all-important API keys for later.
The main focus is creating a subscription product (like "Premium"), then setting up various pricing options—think monthly and yearly plans. We walk through adding each price point to the product, ensuring they’re marked as recurring and choosing the appropriate amount and interval (e.g., $15/month or $120/year).
Once our plans are set up in Stripe, we cover one of the most practical ways to store them in your Laravel app: using a custom subscriptions config file. Instead of relying on database queries, we manually add each plan, its price ID from Stripe, and related display info right into a config array. This keeps things simple and easy to maintain.
By the end of the episode, you’ll have your Stripe products and prices ready, and your Laravel app’s config file set up to work with them. Next time, we’ll be building a pricing page to show off your shiny new plans!