Bits and Rubies

My own stories about software engineering, Ruby && more

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Wearing Stripes (II)

This is the second part of my article about how we migrated our entire billing system to Stripe, here at WeTransfer. Head back to part one to read why we chose Stripe and how we designed our new system around it.

We were happy with how our brand new billing system took shape and quite eager to see it out in the wild. It was time to welcome all our users into the new system. Because the two billing systems were isolated from each other, we had a fairly simple job rolling out the new one. There were basically two ways a user could land on the new system: either through signup, or as a result of them being migrated. Let’s tackle the former first.

The Rollout

We created a feature flag with a few targeting rules, and evaluated it each time a user had signed up. You can think of it as a high level if statement:

post '/signup' do
  if use_new_system?
...

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Wearing Stripes

Over the years, Stripe has become an established name when it comes to online payments. That’s why, they were one of the main contenders we had in mind, here at WeTransfer, when a major overhaul of our billing system was long due. This is a story about how to wear stripes, or more exactly, about how we migrated our entire billing system to Stripe.

The Background

Let’s get back to mid 2018. Our back-in-the-day billing system was pretty basic: it included two plans (monthly and yearly), and supported two currencies (€ for our European users and $ for everyone else). It was baked in-house, integrating an external payment processor and some assorted billing logic, and supported our business for a good number of years already.

However, as WeTransfer became more popular, it was slowly outgrowing this solution, up to the point where it became obvious there was a need for more. That’s why...

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