Section 8 (Lesson 8/10): Most apps require payment and email services in order for us to monetize our apps and communicate with our customers. We’ll look at various options in this lesson, and I’ll talk about my preferred choices: Stripe for payment and Loops for transactional email.

You’ll discover:

Resources folder: ➡ https://e6387a14ba6d0bf3e823090f8d959...

Bubble editor: ➡ https://bubble.io/page?type=page&name...

Bubble integrates extensively with third-party services. We can do this through APIs or plugins. Two services we will definitely need is payments (we need to get paid, we need to monetize our app), and we need to communicate with our customers. Therefore, we probably need transactional email. So after signing up, a user will get a welcome email. After they make a purchase, they need to get a receipt, etc. I wanted to just walk you through a couple of options for payments and email.

So the most popular payments provider is Stripe by a country mile! They're one of my favorite startups, and I use them exclusively across all of my apps. Now Bubble has a plugin that integrates with Stripe pretty seamlessly.

I'm in the Plugins tab. If I go and add a plugin, I can search for "Stripe" and we can see that we have 364,000+ apps using this Stripe plugin. Go ahead and install that. Once that's installed, I'm asked for some data, of which I will get from my Stripe dashboard. So I'd have to sign up to Stripe and then grab that data and input it. I'm going to change to version 3.

Okay, so how do we use it? Well, for instance, if I go to the scratchpad page, I'm going to grab an input, and you don't have to do this. You can just sit back and relax because I'm just showing you what's possible. I'm going to put that Input A in the center. Then I'm going to grab a Button. Drop that in, put that in the center. I'm going to group these two together, tidy them up a little bit.

Okay, so this button could say "Pay" or "Subscribe". This input could be "Amount" and that could be set to an integer. And we can basically run a workflow to take payment! So add a workflow. And now that we've installed the plugin, under the Payment section for actions, we have all of these actions. There is a ton of stuff here. So we can charge a user for a one-off payment, we can collect credit card information which is stored securely on Stripe's servers, not on Bubble servers. We can later on charge them for that saved credit card. We can register them as a seller, which enables us to set up, for instance, Shopify functionality, where we have a platform where users create stores, and those users that create the stores charge other users for products and services.

We can subscribe a user to a plan, and this is where building a SaaS product is so important, so we can charge people on a monthly subscription or weekly, or annual, whatever kind of cadence that we like. We can apply coupons, we can create invoices... the list goes on. We can do all sorts. You can run your entire business using this plugin.

In this instance, we could charge a user. The "Payer email" would be the "Current User's email". The "Amount" would be getting from that input we've just dropped on the page, "Input Amount's value". We can set the currency and all of this other dynamic information.

The Bubble Forum is a great resource for Stripe-related content. It's very interesting to see how some people have created their own API connections to Stripe using backend workflows and webhooks to be able to synchronize with the Stripe dashboard. But you really have everything you need, most probably with this official Bubble Stripe plugin. So that's payment services!

Next is email, and there are many options for email. We have Sendgrid, we have another one called Loops (which I personally prefer). What's nice about Loops is that it's a pretty new service. It's a young, growing startup that seems to cater a lot towards other smaller startups like us and they integrate both transactional email and marketing-based email, which are two separate categories.

If I head back to Bubble and go to the Plugins tab, we have SendGrid plugins for transactional email and we have an official Loops-based plugin that the company Loops created themselves.

To reiterate why we need email services, you need to be able to communicate with your customer. So if we just take Workplace as an example, when someone signs up, we want to send them a welcome email and then maybe we want to put them into a funnel to send them a marketing-based email once a week. We can even do things like determine their behavior or monitor their behavior on our app and then send them event-based marketing or sales emails instantly from our app to say, It looks like you were going to make a purchase for a sponsored job. You didn't complete it. Would you like to complete it? So you can get very, very, very granular with this stuff.

And that's something I use it for! So I also sell courses, a little side project called Buildcamp and when users are logged in and interact with my application, they might go to a course page, they might spend a bit of time on the course page reading through what's involved, clicking different buttons, and then they don''t make a purchase or they get halfway through a purchase and then cancel. Sometimes I'll send them an email to say, Is there anything you need? Any more information? And that often leads to better sales.

But go ahead and make sure that you do look through what plugins are available because you might be in a country where Stripe isn't available, maybe you would like to use PayPal instead. There's all sorts of PayPal plugins available to you.

Another great one for payments is called Lemon Squeezy, and there you go! There's a plugin for Lemon Squeezy. Mailerlite and MailerSend are two other services I like to use for both transactional and marketing-based emails. There are plugins for those as well!

And if you don't find a plugin for a particular service or third-party integration, well, you can build your own plugin if you know a bit of JavaScript, or you can use the API Connector which is a super powerful way to connect and create your own connections to these particular products and services as well. So there's really no limit to what you can connect to with Bubble.

I hope that was insightful for you, and I'll see you in the next lesson!