We should have an onCancelled and onLogin event

[ba32107]

Hi!

CurrentIy, the onPaid event is fired both when a user signs up, and when a user restores an existing subscription. The docs say:

Note: onPaid callbacks will be called after a user pays as well as after a user "logs in" (e.g. activates their paid account on a different browser/profile/install). This may change in the future -- if you'd like this to work differently, please contact me with a detailed explanation of your use case :)

I believe there should be two different events for this. My use-case: I want to send analytics data on both these events, and currently the events triggered by logins skew the signed up count. So for example, if a user pays once, then reinstalls the extension 10 times and logs in each time, I will get 11 "paid" analytics events. I know it's an extreme example, but still important. (actually, I don't really care about the login event, but I do care about the "paid" event only firing when the user actually pays)

Related, there is no way to detect when the user cancels the subscription. I know the plan isn't canceled straight away, but we should know when the user makes the decision to not pay for our product anymore. I spent some time today reading the ExtPay code and understanding how these event handlers work, and I believe it would be pretty easy to add this event. Just need to fire a message when the user clicks the "cancel" button in the ExtPay popup. Currently my only alternative is to somehow poll the user in my background script and check the subscriptionCancelAt field.

Tracking these events correctly is very important, since all of us developers here want to monetize our products. I am building analytics around user conversion rate and cancellations, and the second one is a blind spot.

PS: I would be happy to contribute! I have a reasonable understanding of how the open source part works. However, in order to contribute these events, we also need to change your server side, so I am not able to help :)

[ba32107]

In the interim, I would also be happy with a reasonable workaround for the cancelled event. My only idea so far is, whenever I open the payments page for the user, I will poll the user's subscriptionCancelAt field for, say, 5 minutes? The idea being that if someone wants to cancel, they have to open the page, and hopefully they will complete it within 5 minutes.

[Glench]

Please DO NOT poll the subscriptionCancelAt field. This is a great way to DDOS ExtensionPay's servers. What you can do instead is whenever you would normally call extpay.getUser() within your extension, replace it with your own function that calls extpay.getUser() and also checks if the subscriptionCancelAt field changes so it's a more on-demand check. OR you can add your own DOM listener to the cancel button in the ExtensionPay popup.

Otherwise, the onLogin and onCancel events are a good idea. Right now we're focused on getting ExtPay 4.0 done, but maybe we'll add those after. Cheers!

[ba32107]

OR you can add your own DOM listener to the cancel button in the ExtensionPay popup.

This is a good idea and seems the most straightforward - will do this, thanks! Don't know why I didn't think of this one :) The only issue is that my implementation will depend on the DOM structure of your popup, so on the off chance you change that, my code will break. But it's a non-critical path, so it's fine.

[ba32107]

Hi @Glench , do you have a suggestion for a workaround to implement onLogin? I was able to detect the login event by putting this into a content script:

window.addEventListener('message', (event) => {
    if (event.origin !== 'https://extensionpay.com' || event.source !== window || event.data !== "fetch-user") {
        return
    }

    if (event.source.location.href.toLowerCase().includes('reactivate-from-email')) {
        console.log('login!')
    }

}, false)

This works fine, I can track the login event here (for my analytics). However this event will still reach the onPaid event listener (which is where I'm tracking the "user signed up" analytics) so it will still count logins as "subscribed" events which is not what I want. Do you have a good idea here?

The only thing I can think of is to completely ditch the onPaid event listener, and extend the above code with something like this:

    if (event.source.location.href.toLowerCase().includes('reactivate-from-email')) {
        console.log('track login event')
    } else if (event.source.location.href.toLowerCase().includes('subscribed')) {
        console.log('track new subscriber event')
    }

But I don't really like this, because now I'm completely dependent on your internal implementation for my analytics. I would like to use the onPaid event which is part of your public stable API, if I can.