Adding a billing integration resource

To enable the monetization of your Product Plans, you must add a billing integration resource in your IBM® API Connect provider organization that defines the configuration data needed to synchronize with an external subscription billing system.

Before you begin

To use Stripe as your credit card processing vendor, you must have port 443 open to HTTPS communication between the Stripe API and your Developer Portal management and the Management cluster servers. See Firewall requirements on Kubernetes and Firewall requirements on VMware for more information about this requirement.

Before you can create billing resources in provider organizations, the billing microservice must be enabled on your management system by your system administrator. See Configuring monetization on VMware and Configuring monetization on Kubernetes for more information.

You must either be the provider organization owner, or have Settings: Manage permissions, to complete this task.

You must have an account with Stripe to be able to complete this task. If you do not already have a Stripe account, you can set one up at: www.stripe.com.

About this task

API Connect supports integration with Stripe Subscription Billing, an independent cloud service that manages monetized product Plans, customers, their payment information, and their subscription history, in order to generate monthly invoices and charge customers automatically. With this integration, Stripe serves as both the subscription billing system and the payment processing system. When API consumers subscribe to Product Plans with billing in the Developer Portal, they set up automatic payments through a credit card registered with Stripe. To enable this billing process, you must first specify your Stripe account information by creating a billing integration resource. The subscription payment amount is processed from the account that is provided by the API consumer, and credited to the account that you provide as the API provider.

Important: Each Stripe account comes with two sets of API keys, one for testing, and one for production. Each set of API keys has a distinct namespace for Stripe objects. Test API keys cannot see objects created by production API keys, and vice versa. You cannot switch the API keys of one of your billing integrations with the keys from another account, or swap your test and production keys over, as that would prevent API Connect from resolving the Stripe objects that were created by using the old keys. If you want to use your Stripe test keys, you must create a separate Catalog for testing, and not add your Stripe test keys to production Catalogs.

Procedure

To create a billing integration resource, complete the following steps:

  1. In the API Manager, click Resources Resources.
  2. Ensure that you are in the provider organization to which you want to add the billing integration.
  3. Select Billing, and then click Add.
    The Add billing integration page for Stripe integration is displayed.
  4. Enter a Title for your billing integration.
  5. The Name is auto-generated based on the Title that you enter, and is a single string that can be used in developer toolkit CLI commands.
  6. Enter the Publishable key and Secret key for your Stripe account.
    Refer to your Stripe dashboard to get your publishable key and secret key; see https://dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys.
  7. Click Add to create your billing integration resource.

Results

Your new billing integration resource is listed in the table on the Billing dashboard. The table also displays the state of the job queue for the billing integration. Any issues with the job queue are displayed in this table. See Billing integration resource job queues for more information.

What to do next

To be able to publish monetized Product Plans, you must add the billing integration resource to your Catalog, and to the Sandbox Catalog. See Adding a billing integration resource to a Catalog for details.