All BlueprintsCommerce
Subscription box
A monthly box, billed on a cycle: customers pick a plan, see the day the next charge lands, and skip, pause, switch or stop it themselves. The shop sees who is due, what to pack, and who it is still chasing.
What you’ll build.
A subscription with real billing. Customers pick a plan, see the next charge date, skip or pause a month, switch plans halfway through and pay the exact difference, and cancel on a date the site names. A card that fails is retried on a schedule and then given up on. The shop sees who is due and what to pack.
What you’ll learn.
Each sprint is built around one skill. You show you have it in a pull request your team reviews, then explain it in a walkthrough.
Authentication
You can register and sign in a user, keep a request authenticated without asking for the password again, and explain where the credential lives in the browser and why there rather than somewhere else.
Charging the same card monthly
You can start a subscription, produce the next charge on time exactly once, and show what happens between a failed renewal and a cancelled subscription.
Roles and permissions
You can give users different roles and have the server refuse what a role may not do — not merely hide the button — and show the refusal working against a request the interface never offered.
Background jobs
You can hand work to a worker, tell the user it is in progress, and show the result when it lands — and say what happens to that work if the process dies halfway.
Going live
Somebody who has never met you can open a URL and use the product — and you can say what is different about the copy running there, where its secrets come from, and what you do when a release turns out to be wrong.
The roadmap. 8 sprints, 42 tasks.
Every sprint has a goal and a set of tasks. Open a sprint to see the tasks you will pick up.
An account to bill
Somebody can make an account, come back to it tomorrow, and sign out of it properly.
4 tasks
- Somebody can sign up and land inside
- Coming back tomorrow does not mean signing in again
- Signing out means signed out
- An account with no subscription says what to do next
The cycle
A customer picks a plan, is charged once, and knows the day the next charge lands.
6 tasks
- The shop writes down what it sells
- Paying without a real card
- Picking a plan charges once and names the next date
- A billing day that can be run for any date
- The same billing day, run twice, bills once
- A customer can see what they have paid and what is next
Two sides of the counter
The shop sees who is due and what to pack. A customer sees only their own subscription, because the product refuses rather than hides.
5 tasks
- The shop has staff accounts, and nobody can issue themselves one
- The shop sees who is due and what to pack
- A customer sees only their own subscription
- Asking directly for somebody else's subscription is refused
- The shop can start a subscription for somebody who rang up
Changing your mind
A customer can skip a month, pause, or stop, and the product names the day each one takes effect.
5 tasks
- A customer can skip the next box
- Skipping has a deadline, and the product says what it is
- A pause names the day it comes back
- Stopping takes effect at the end of what has been paid for
- Changing their mind about stopping costs nothing
Halfway through the month
A plan change in the middle of a period costs the right amount, to the penny, and does not move the day of the month.
5 tasks
- A customer is told what a switch costs before they confirm
- Switching up mid-period charges only for the days that are left
- Switching down leaves a credit that the next charge spends
- The day of the month does not move when the plan does
- Switching twice in one period does not charge twice for the same days
The card says no
A failed charge is chased on a schedule the shop chose, then let go, and nobody is cut off by surprise.
6 tasks
- A declined charge does not end the subscription
- The charge is retried on days the shop chose
- The customer is told in time to do something about it
- A new card is charged straight away
- After the last attempt, it stops, and both sides can see why
- The shop can see everybody it is chasing
Work that runs itself
The billing day happens on its own, at the right hour, and never charges anybody twice.
5 tasks
- The billing day happens without anybody pressing anything
- A run that dies halfway does not charge anybody twice
- A failure is visible without a customer reporting it
- The run uses today's facts, not the ones it was scheduled with
- Messages that the run sends go out once
Open for business
The shop is on the internet at its own address, billing real dates on its own, with nobody's laptop involved.
6 tasks
- A stranger can reach it without you
- Nothing it needs lives only on your laptop
- The billing day runs there, in the shop's own time
- The messages genuinely leave
- An address worth giving out
- A bad release can be undone before the next billing day
Read before you build. The best engineers do.
Senior engineers read the docs before they touch the code. Every Blueprint comes with short documents on the product and its world, the kind a team hands a new hire. Read them well and you ask sharper questions and walk into every review prepared.
What you are building
The product, who it is for, and what finished means.
How a billing cycle actually works
Domain you will not have: anchor days, periods, what a skip moves, and why churn is a date problem before it is a price problem.
More commerce Blueprints.
Corner shop storefront
A small shop sells online. The shelf shows what is genuinely there, a basket survives the tab it was made in, the shop never takes money for a tin it does not have, and the buyer can follow their order until they pick it up.
Food ordering with options
Ordering for one restaurant, where a dish is a set of choices rather than a price. A size replaces the base price, extras add to it, some extras only exist on some sizes, and the total the customer is charged is worked out from what they chose rather than taken from the browser.
Restock waitlist
A waiting list for what a small shop has run out of. People ask to be told when it returns, and when three come back the stock goes down the line in the order they asked: held long enough to act on, offered to nobody behind them until that window closes, and never offered to the same person twice.
Build subscription box.
Start your free week. Adaeze runs your kickoff, and Lars reviews every pull request.