Register a customer

Learn how to register a customer in Tier as soon as they are created in your application, either after registration or during onboarding.

Before getting started

To get the most out of this quick-start guide, you’ll need:

Stripe secret key
Select your pricing model & sync with Stripe
Basic auth implementation with auth guards

You will never have to sync any Tier or pricing-specific details to your DB, Tier will ensure that you get the most updated pricing and usage data, except user data.

You need to ensure that your customer information in Tier is always updated whenever there is a change that happens in your DB

SDK Object definition


OrgInfo	Stores information about your customer like email, description, name and billing info, it would be ideal if you can update these details before you request a checkout.

Do note that we call our “customers” as “organizations”, as it is very relevant in the billing terminology of the SaaS world. You will see the guide interchanging between the reference of a customer and an organization/org.

1. Initialize Tier SDK

Initialize the Tier SDK, ideally in a singleton design pattern, with both TIER_BASE_URL and TIER_API_KEY environment variables set with the prescribed values.

// To make use of Tier Cloud Alpha you need to
// points base URL to the Tier API server
TIER_BASE_URL = "https://api.tier.run"
// and set Tier API Key as your Stripe secret key
TIER_API_KEY = "sk_test_51..."

Import Tier

import tier from "tier"

2. Register a customer

When you encounter a new customer, either after your sign-up or during your onboarding process, you should register the details of your customer in Tier as well.

Register a customer

await tier.updateOrg(
	org: 'org:customer-id-from-your-db', // This is a concatenation of 'org' and your 'customerId' from your DB
	{
			// Update the organization/customer information if required,
			// and provide all details even if you want to change just one field
			name: 'Customer name', // Optional: update customer name if needed
			email: 'customer@email.com', // Optional: update customer email if needed
			phone: '+11 1111 1111', // Optional: update customer email if needed
			metadata: {
				any: 'any' // Optional: add any additional details as metadata
			},
			description: 'description', // Optional: update customer description if needed
			invoiceSettings: {
				defaultPaymentMethod: 'payment-method-id', // Optional: update customer default payment method if needed
			},
		},
);

3. Assign a default plan (optional)

If your customer has to be subscribed to a default plan of your pricing model then, you should subscribe them to it right after registering them in Tier.

Assign a default plan

await tier.subscribe(
  `org:customer-id-from-your-db`,
  `plan:free@1` // ID of the plan you created in the pricing model
)

This quickstart will give you an idea of how to register your customer in Tier. You can also refer to our SDK references to understand more about update() and subscribe().

Check our SDK references for more details on these topics.