There are two core components to make subscriptions work for your Discourse application. These are **Products** and **Plans**.
A Product describes what the user gets when they subscribe. It has a name and description and is associated with a Discourse user group.
A Plan is how you charge your users for the Product. Plans have rates, billing intervals and trial periods. A Product may have multiple Plans. For example: a yearly and a monthly Plan. You can't change plans much once they are created but you can archive them and create new ones.
When you get a moment, take a look at Stripe's documentation. But for now, you can set up an account in test mode and see how it all works without making any real transactions. Then, if you're happy with how everything works, you can start taking real transactions. See below for test credit card numbers.
When a user successfully subscribes to your Discourse application, after their credit card transation has been processed, they are added to a User Group. By assigning users to a User Group, you can manage what your users have access to on your website. User groups are a core functionality of Discourse and this plugin does nothing with them except and and remove users from the group you accociated with your Plan.
Many thanks to Chris Beach and Angus McLeod who helped on the [previous version](https://github.com/chrisbeach/discourse-donations) of this plugin. Many thanks to the Discourse team who sponsored this plugin! You guys rock.
