Spark Addons

Grow your revenue by offering multiple add-on subscriptions in your Laravel Spark app.

• Define "add-on" subscriptions
• Supported metered (pay as you go) and licensed (monthly fee) usage types
• Support multiple plans for each add-on
• Allow users to subscribe and cancel their subscription to an add-on plan
• Implemented in a similar style to existing Spark functionality

Installation

1. Include the package

composer require benmag/laravel-spark-addons

1. Publish and run the migrations

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=spark-addons-migrations && php artisan migrate

1. Update change your Spark class in config/app.php

[
    'aliases' => [
        'Spark' => \Benmag\SparkAddons\Spark::class,
    ]
]

1. Switch the use Laravel\Spark\Spark; class in SparkServiceProvider to use Benmag\SparkAddons\Spark;

2. Add the BillableAddonSubscriptions trait to your Team model

namespace App;
 
use Laravel\Spark\Team as SparkTeam;
use Benmag\SparkAddons\Traits\BillableAddonSubscriptions;
 
class Team extends SparkTeam
{
    use BillableAddonSubscriptions; 
    //...
}

1. Ensure the Vue components for spark-addons get built by adding

require("./../../../vendor/benmag/laravel-spark-addons/resources/assets/js/bootstrap");

To your resources/assets/js/components/bootstrap.js file.

1. Add your spark-addons config to your global Spark object in your layout file (resources/views/vendor/spark/layouts/app.blade.php)

<!-- Global Spark Object -->
<script>
    window.Spark = <?php echo json_encode(array_merge(
        Spark::scriptVariables(), [
            'spark-addons' => config('spark-addons')
        ]
    )); ?>
</script>

1. Show current add-on subscriptions in the subscriptions page by adding:

<addon-subscriptions
    :user="user"
    :team="team"
    :billable-type="billableType">
</addon-subscriptions>

To the views/vendor/spark/settings/subscription.blade.php view

1. Configure your add-on subscriptions! (See the Usage section below)

Usage

You can now define available add-on plans in a similar style to how you define your Spark plans inside your SparkServiceProvider.

// SocketCluster
Spark::addon(new \Benmag\SparkAddons\Addon([
    'id' => 'socketcluster',
    'name' => 'SocketCluster',
    'description' => "A scalable framework for real-time apps and services.",
]));
 
// SocketCluster - Plan: Hobby
Spark::addonPlan('socketcluster', 'Hobby', 'socketcluster:hobby')
    ->price(19)
    ->trialDays(15)
    ->features([
        "Powered by 512mb RAM",
        "No complicated setup",
        "Email support"
    ])
    ->attributes([
        'description' => "Single 512mb SocketCluster instance, perfect for development",
    ]);
    
    
// Servers
Spark::addon(new \Benmag\SparkAddons\Addon([
    'id' => 'servers',
    'name' => 'Servers',
    'description' => "High performance cloud servers provisioned for you.",
]));
 
// Servers: Standard 1X
Spark::addonPlan('servers', 'Standard 1X', 'servers:standard-1x')
    ->usageType('metered')
    ->price(0.10)
    ->features([
        '512MB RAM',
        '1 Core Processor',
        '20GB SSD Disk',
        '1TB Transfer'
    ])
    ->attributes([
        'description' => "512MB RAM. Perfect server to power hobby and small apps.",
    ]);
    
// 

Configuration

Publish config

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=spark-addons-config

Publish assets

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=spark-addons-assets

Publish views

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=spark-addons-views

Metered Billing

Metered billing or usage based billing allows you to charge your customer an amount based on what they have actually consumed by taking advantage of Stripe's metered billing.

For example, at Codemason, our users can use Codemason Servers to run their apps. These servers are billed by the hour at the corresponding rate and can be cancelled at any time. At the end of the month, the customer is billed for the amount of hours they have accumulated.

By default metered add-on plans are measuring usage by the hour. However, it's easy to swap this implementation out for your own, just as you would for any other Spark interaction with the Spark::swap technique.

The behind the scenes of how this works is fairly simple: at the end of the billing cylce, Stripe fires a invoice.created webhook approximately an hour before the invoice is finalised and a charge is attempted. When your app receives that webhook, it calculates the number of hours the add-on has been active for and updates Stripe with the usage.

To make use of this functionality, you will make some additional configurations. Don't worry, it's still very easy and very straight forward.

Override the default Stripe Webhook (required)

The main thing we will need to do is make sure that the SparkAddonsServiceProvider is being manually registered after the SparkServiceProvider. This is to ensure that we're using our new controller that listens for the invoice.created webhook to perform usage calculations at the end of the month.

Disable auto-discovery so we can override the existing spark/webhook that Laravel Spark provides

Do this by adding the following to your composer.json file:

"extra": {
    "laravel": {
        "dont-discover": [
            "laravel/dusk",
            "benmag/laravel-spark-addons"
        ]
    }
},

Manually register the SparkAddonsServiceProvider after the SparkServiceProvider in the providers array in config/app.php

'providers' => [
    Laravel\Spark\Providers\SparkServiceProvider::class,
    App\Providers\SparkServiceProvider::class,
    Benmag\SparkAddons\SparkAddonsServiceProvider::class,
    // ...
]

Interactions

These are the interactions, you are able to override them with your own custom implementations where required using Spark::swap

Example

We use this approach at Codemason to manage the subscriptions for our add-ons. Codemason is an end-to-end cloud platform and with Codemason Add-on’s, users are able to launch production-grade apps with a click.

SocketCluster Add-on

About Codemason

We ❤️ Laravel Spark. We used Laravel Spark for Codemason so we could focus on building functionality our users loved, instead of writing boilerplate code. Codemason is the Laravel Spark of servers/hosting

Working on a Laravel Spark project? People who use Spark know how important their time is. Save yourself hours of fighting with servers by using Codemason.

Don't forget to use the coupon SPARK-3-FREE to get 3 months free access!