Moonlit Pay: one billing layer for everything we build

Every app we make eventually needs the same things: a way to take money, a way to run subscriptions, receipts, a place for customers to manage their billing, and a way to tell the app that someone paid. Building that again for each app is slow, and customers end up with a different billing experience in every product.

So we built Moonlit Pay, and we're moving the Moonlit Company's billing onto it.

What Moonlit Pay is

Moonlit Pay is the billing layer for Moonlit apps and the partner apps that use it. A customer is an email address, so one person can use several apps and see all of their billing in one place.

It handles:

• Checkout for one-time purchases and subscriptions, with promotion codes and per-seat or usage-based pricing.
• Subscriptions, including plan changes, cancellation at the end of the period, and retries when a payment fails.
• A billing portal where customers see their subscriptions, invoices and receipts across every app, and update their card.
• Moonlit Cash, credit on an account that can pay for any app that accepts it. Customers can top it up, and it can be given as a gift card.
• An API and signed webhooks, so an app can create a checkout and learn when someone has paid, without touching card details.

Card payments are processed by Stripe. Moonlit Pay sits on top of Stripe and gives us one set of rules, one customer record and one place to look.

Why we're switching

Until now, billing has been wired up directly to Stripe, and each app has carried its own version of that. That works, but it spreads the logic out. Every time we want a new rule, such as how a discount applies to a second purchase or how a customer's credit is used, it has to be built in more than one place.

Moving to Moonlit Pay means:

• One customer, many apps. A person who subscribes to one product and buys from another sees both in a single portal, with a single set of receipts.
• One set of rules. Discounts, credit and refunds work the same way in every app, and the rules live in one codebase we can test.
• We own the customer relationship. Stripe still processes the payments, but the customer's account, history and credit belong to us, not to any single app.
• Faster new apps. A new product needs a plan and a few API calls, not a new billing system.

What changes for you

If you build or run one of our apps, you'll call Moonlit Pay's API instead of Stripe's directly. Your app will receive the same kinds of events it does now, such as a completed checkout or a payment that failed. The API reference is in the Moonlit Pay docs.

Customers will see a single billing portal and receipts from Moonlit Pay. Card payments still show up on their statement as usual.

What's next

We'll keep adding to the platform: gift cards you can buy, not just redeem, and more ways to pay. If something in your billing isn't working the way you expect, tell us. We'd rather find it now than after the move.