feat: implement premium subscription management #1
Description
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
One of the earliest requested features for ambianic was SMS notifications. Over time it has become clear that users expect ambianic to promptly alert them about a detected incident such as a person fallen down.
As it turns out sending alerts via e-mail, SMS or another channel, requires using commercial cloud APIs that take care of spam and ensure that alerts come across without being lost or blocked.
We implemented a notification feature on the edge via apprise. It requires the user to edit config.yaml and provide their credentials for a corresponding cloud API of choice.
We also discussed at length options for free and reliable alerts that do not require cloud APIs and the closest solution we came across was to send alerts to a local Home Assistant Hub ambianic/ambianic-ui#515 . We are pursuing this as a viable approach for DYI users who have Home Assistant at home.
However majority of end users who interact via the UI PWA still ask for a more convenient option. An easy to use, general purpose notification mechanism that can alert family, caregivers, friends or neighbors in case of an high priority incident.
In order to offer this type of general purpose alerting, we would have to charge users a subscription fee that covers underlying infrastructure and cloud API costs. This in turn requires user identity, subscription and billing management.
Describe the solution you'd like
Implement user identity, subscription and billing management based on the Netlify Identity + Stripe blueprint:
- https://github.com/stripe-samples/netlify-stripe-subscriptions
- https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/integrating-customer-portal
Describe alternatives you've considered
There are many user identity and subscription management solutions. We just need to pick one of the good ones and do it.
Apart from being a good hosting brand, Netlify has also been a great supporter of ambianic via their free hosting tier for open source projects. They have been hosting ui.ambianic.ai since the beginning of the project in 2020. It is only natural to choose them as a partner for our premium subscription services.