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Support for Stripe Payment Links

Sep 9, 2021

A few months ago, Stripe launched Payment Links — the absolute easiest way to collect payments (both one-time and on a recurring basis) on the internet with absolutely no code required.

(A disclosure: I work for Stripe! We’re hiring.)

First, take a look at what one of these Payment Links look like (courtesy of a great Buttondown newsletter, Pain Science):

An example of a Checkout page generated by Payment Links.

Historically, the only way you’ve been able to collect paid subscribers for your Buttondown newsletter is by going through Buttondown’s official channels: funnel a subscriber onto your subscribe page (or a page with an embedded subscription widget), collect their email, and then prompt them to pay.

This is a good workflow, but it’s certainly not perfect for all use cases. Buttondown’s subscription paradigm is not perfectly portable, and doesn’t yet support things like Apple Pay or local payment methods common in European markets.


Enter: Payment Links!

The screen to add a new Payment Link in Stripe. 

Because Buttondown integrates directly with your Stripe account, prospective paid subscribers no longer need to go through your Buttondown newsletter to collect payments or subscriptions. You can head over to your Stripe dashboard and generate a Payment Link for your Buttondown subscriptions and instantly get a URL to share with your Twitter followers or Twitch audience or whomever. Buttondown will automatically detect the new subscriptions and create paid subscribers as they come in.

(One thing that Buttondown doesn’t handle at the moment is the ability to generate a subscriber list for customers who have signed up through Stripe for subscriptions to serviced other than Buttondown. If you’re interested in exploring this world — for instance, being able to spin up an arbitrary newsletter based on the customers that are already in your Stripe account — please email me! I’d love to hear more.)

And, as always, if you have any questions, feature requests, or suggestions — I’m all ears. My aim is to make Buttondown as easy to use as possible, and you — yes, you! — probably have some great ideas on how to get there.

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