Luke's dashboard

Luke replied on November 17, 2009 22:02 to the idea "My wish list for Spreedly" in Spreedly:

Has any work been done on promo codes? I would love to be able to offer promo codes this Christmas season to help promote my site with some special offers.

Luke gave praise in Spreedly on October 20, 2009 14:46:

Switching gateways was a breeze!

I just wanted to say "thanks" for making it so easy to switch gateways. This weekend, I switched from PayPal to First Data Global Gateway. After I got the credentials to process transactions through the gateway, it literally took me all of 2 minutes to update Spreedly. Subscriptions immediately started processing with the new gateway without a hitch. It worked flawlessly, and I was thrilled. Thanks!

Luke asked a question in Spreedly on August 14, 2009 21:20:

What is "grace period" and how can I turn it off?

I just noticed today for the first time that some of my users were accessing my site after their free trial has expired. I did some debugging and discovered that Spreedly never notified that their trial has ended (by setting the is_active flag to false). Upon looking even further I notice there is now a "grace period ends" item on a user's subscription page in my Spreedly interface.

Is this a new feature? If so, is it possible to disable it? I don't want to enable grace periods on my free trial plans. I looked around in the configurations but I didn't see any option to disable it.

Thanks!

Luke replied on August 08, 2009 11:32 to the idea "My wish list for Spreedly" in Spreedly:

Thanks Nathaniel, keep up the great work!

Luke replied on July 21, 2009 22:02 to the question "Is it possible to export transaction data for our accountant?" in Spreedly:

That's great, it's exactly what I'm needing. However, I can't quite make sense of how it works. I called it with no since_id parameter, and it seems to have returned a random assortment of transactions from May to today, not all of them, and not the 50 most recent.

Also, from the documentation, it's unclear what since_id will do. Are transaction id's unique to my site? So if I subtract 50 and iterate, will I then get all the transactions for my site? Or if transaction id is global to Spreedly, how would I loop back and get all my previous transactions?

Perhaps a more useful parameter would be to specify a date range.

The data that the API call provides looks great though, that's exactly the information I'm wanting to retrieve.

Thanks,
Luke

Luke started following the idea "Implement discount vouchers" in Spreedly.

Luke replied on July 21, 2009 13:50 to the question "Is it possible to export transaction data for our accountant?" in Spreedly:

I agree with this. I don't need it from the API (although that would be nice), but even just exposing a CSV export link in the Spreedly interface would be excellent. Specifically what I need is a way to download transaction history within a time frame or all time. This will make doing my taxes a lot easier. :)

Luke shared an idea in Spreedly on July 13, 2009 12:02:

Automatically canceling after renewal failure

It would be nice to have an option to automatically cancel a subscription after X auto-renewal failures. Currently I have to go in manually in order to stop it from continually automatically renewing the subscription when the card authorization fails. It will do it twice a day otherwise. I'd like an option to have it retry maybe 2 or 4 times, then just turn itself off.

Luke shared an idea in Spreedly on June 19, 2009 13:50:

Subscription notes for admins

It would be nice to add notes to a subscriber's account in Spreedly. I just refunded a purchase through PayPal, and canceled the subscription manually in Spreedly. It would be nice to be able to write a note that gets stored with the subscription log to explain my actions so I can remember what happened later if I look at his account again.

Luke marked one of Duff OMelia's replies in Spreedly as useful. Duff OMelia replied to the problem "Notifications page VERY slow".

Luke replied on June 12, 2009 20:50 to the problem "Notifications page VERY slow" in Spreedly:

awesome thanks! I was wondering if that was the problem, because I noticed it getting gradually slower over the past few months. :) Thanks!

Luke reported a problem in Spreedly on June 12, 2009 16:38:

Notifications page VERY slow

On the overview page when I click "notifications", it takes about 2 minutes to load the page.

Luke gave praise in Spreedly on May 21, 2009 12:50:

I love the new look! Great work!

Great work on the revamped look of Spreedly. It's crisp, clean, and simple. I love it!

Luke shared an idea in Spreedly on May 19, 2009 13:06:

Gift certificates

Ever since Christmas, I've been toying with an idea in my head. This past Christmas I wanted a way to allow my existing subscribers to purchase a subscription for friends and family who may not yet have signed up for my service. I could shoehorn the Gift Plan functionality into this, but that's not really how it was designed, and it would be a bit cumbersome. I'd have to create a subscription for the person, then apply the gift plan. The problem with that is what if they don't start using the plan right away? Also, I don't know many details about them right away either, so creating a subscription would be difficult.

Then this morning, I had an epiphany. Gift Certificates! Have you ever considered having the ability to purchase gift certificates that can be redeemed later?

Here's how I envision it working:

1. A user purchases a gift certificate through Spreedly and are given a redemption code and a security code. The redemption code is displayed, or given in a nifty printable form so they can print and gift wrap it. The security code is either chosen by them, or generated and emailed to them separately (or somehow given over some other channel).

2. Their friend signs up for service on my website and enters the gift certificate redemption code and security code and are comped with the purchased amount. Existing customers could also redeem certificates the same way and are comped.

This feature would be great for promotions especially around graduation and Christmas, both of which are times when someone might consider purchasing a budgeting solution for a friend.

Luke shared an idea in Spreedly on May 08, 2009 17:28:

New release of the Spreedly PHP API

Hi everyone. I've been a very happy Spreedly client for several months. When I started with Spreedly, there wasn't a PHP API. I created one, and shared it with the community, but it was terrible. This morning, I rewrote it from scratch and modeled it after the Ruby gem created by Nathaniel Talbott. If you're a PHP developer and want to integrate with Spreedly, take a look at http://www.neobudget.com/spreedly.

Luke started following the idea "Reference Payments" in Spreedly.

Luke marked one of Nathaniel Talbott's replies in Spreedly as useful. Nathaniel Talbott replied to the question "Could you explain how a Gift Plan works?".

Luke replied on April 01, 2009 17:13 to the question "Could you explain how a Gift Plan works?" in Spreedly:

Yep, thanks! This past Christmas, I was considering offering a discounted gift plan, where users could purchase NeoBudget for new users (who didn't have a subscription yet) as a Christmas gift. This would hopefully help get some new users on the site. I'm not sure this would be worth the effort, I doubt too many people would do this. I was just curious if the gift plan option would cover this case. It seems like if I wanted to do that, I could create a new user account, then attach the gift plan to that new account.

Oh well, I probably won't bother with it. Just curious. Thanks for the explanation.

Luke replied on March 31, 2009 18:12 to the question "Could you explain how a Gift Plan works?" in Spreedly:

Also, are gift plans recurring, or one-time purchases?

Luke asked a question in Spreedly on March 31, 2009 18:10:

Could you explain how a Gift Plan works?

I don't fully understand how a Gift Plan works. Specifically in the situation where a subscriber purchases a gift subscription for a friend (who does not already have a subscription).

Also, if a person purchases a gift plan for another existing subscriber, what happens after the gift plan expires? Will the user be charged as they normally would have, or do they need to add their card info again?