What is a billing portal?

What a billing portal is

Any business that charges people on a schedule gets the same support requests: my card expired, I want the bigger plan, can I have last month's invoice, please cancel. A billing portal answers all of them with one page. The customer opens it from their account, usually through a Manage billing button, and sees their current plan, the next billing date and amount, the card on file and their past invoices. From there they can add a new card, move to another plan, update the business name or address that appears on invoices, and cancel. Payment providers such as Stripe offer hosted portals, which means the provider builds and secures the page, handles the card details and keeps everything in step with the subscription records. The business configures which actions are allowed and adds its name and colours. Because the card details never touch the business's own site, a hosted portal also keeps card handling off the business's plate.

How a hosted portal session works

The customer presses Manage billing on the business's site. The site's server asks the payment provider for a portal session for that customer, and the provider returns a short lived, single use address. The site sends the customer there, they make their changes on the provider's page, and a Return button brings them back to a page the business chose. The important design point is that the session is created by the server for the signed in customer, so nobody can open another customer's billing by guessing an address. Changes made in the portal, such as a plan switch or a cancellation, update the subscription at the provider, which then notifies the business's server, usually through a webhook. The site updates its own record of the subscription from that notice, so access to members only content, for example, follows the change automatically rather than waiting for someone to edit it by hand.

When a business needs one

As soon as a business sells anything recurring, such as memberships, subscription boxes, software, coaching packages or monthly donations, it needs a way for customers to update a card, or failed payments start eating revenue. Cards expire every few years and get replaced after fraud, so a share of subscribers will need to update one each year. A portal also makes cancelling easy, which sounds like a loss but tends to reduce chargebacks and complaints, because a customer who cannot find the cancel button often disputes the charge with their bank instead. Regulators in several countries have looked hard at subscriptions that are easy to start and hard to stop, and Australian consumer law already prohibits misleading conduct and unfair terms. A business with a handful of subscribers might manage billing by email for a while, but that stops scaling quickly and leaves card changes depending on a person being available.

Common mistakes

Hiding the Manage billing link several menus deep. Allowing sign up online but requiring a phone call to cancel. Building a home made card form instead of using the provider's hosted page, which brings card security obligations with it. Letting the portal and the site disagree, for example a cancelled subscription that still unlocks content because the site never read the provider's notice. Cutting access the moment someone cancels when they have paid until the end of the period. Offering plan changes in the portal without deciding how price differences are handled mid cycle. Forgetting invoices for business customers who need them for tax. And not checking which actions the portal allows: if customers can switch to a plan the business has retired, someone will, and support then has to untangle a subscription that should not exist.

Where it shows up in OneCraft

When a site is generated with subscriptions or paid memberships, the AI follows its payments and subscriptions guides: plans are rows in the site's own database with a name, price, currency and month or year interval, the price is read from that row rather than the browser, and a Manage billing button in the person's account opens the Stripe billing portal, where they can change their card or cancel. OneCraft's webhook keeps the site's subscriptions table up to date with each subscriber's status and period end, and visitors cannot write to it. Gated content checks that table, so access follows a cancellation automatically. Payments go to the owner's connected Stripe account, connected in account Settings, Payments, with a platform fee of 2, 1 or 0.5 percent by plan and Stripe's own fees on top. The free plan cannot take payments.

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