How Subscription Access Should Work In A Trading Platform
A pricing page is a promise. The code must make sure each plan gets exactly what was promised, no more and no less.
Subscription access is not just a payment problem. It is a trust problem. When a user pays for Pro or Elite, the platform has to unlock the right features immediately and protect the same features from every route.
A clean access system has three layers: pricing copy, UI gates and server-side enforcement. All three need to agree.
The pricing page is the contract
Every feature listed under a plan should exist somewhere in the product. If the pricing page says private Elite community, the dashboard needs a private Elite community. If it says import, the import workflow needs to exist.
This sounds obvious, but many platforms treat pricing as marketing and product as separate. That creates support problems and lost trust.
UI gates are not enough
A disabled button can guide the user, but it cannot protect the product. API routes and database policies must enforce access too. Otherwise a user can bypass the interface.
The correct pattern is simple: show the right button, check the plan on the server and let the database protect the final write.
Checkout should recover gracefully
Payment systems have real-world edge cases. A stored customer can be deleted, a test customer can leak into live data or an environment can change. The checkout should detect that and create a fresh customer instead of showing a raw error.
A good billing flow feels boring because it handles these cases before the user has to understand them.
Webhooks complete the loop
The checkout starts the subscription, but the webhook updates access. That means the platform must map Stripe price IDs to internal plans and write the plan to the profile when the subscription becomes active.
If the webhook fails, billing and access drift apart. That is why release checks must include environment variables, price IDs and webhook secret.
The release standard
A subscription platform is ready when each feature is represented in pricing, routed in the app, enforced in APIs, protected in the database and checked in the build.
That standard is slower than just adding a button, but it is the difference between a platform and a prototype.
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