Developer preview
Customer portal
Let customers manage their own subscriptions, payments, and account information using the customer portal. Now in developer preview.
What's new?
We've released the customer portal in developer preview. This gives customers a centralized place to manage purchases made from your Paddle account.
How it works
The customer portal is a secure, Paddle-hosted page that customers can use to manage their own subscriptions, payments, and account information.
Each customer has a unique customer portal for your Paddle account, with magic link sign in.
In the future, you can link to the customer portal to add key billing workflows to your app, rather than building workflows from scratch yourself. Email receipts sent by Paddle will automatically include a link to the customer portal for your account.
Developer preview program guidelines
Why are we doing this?
Businesses that sell digital products, especially SaaS businesses, need a way to handle billing queries. For scaling businesses, this means either relying on support or spending precious engineering time building billing management screens from scratch.
The customer portal gives you a centralized place where customers can manage purchases made from your Paddle account. It's fully hosted by Paddle, meaning you can integrate in minutes — link to your portal and we'll take care of the rest.
As we update the Paddle platform, we'll update the customer portal in tandem to make sure it supports all the billing functionality offered by Paddle. This means you can offer the latest billing-related features with minimal effort.
What's included?
For the developer preview, we've released the customer portal for testing by Paddle platform users. We don't recommend that you replace billing management in your app using the customer portal just yet.
With the customer portal, customers can:
Are there any limitations?
While in developer preview, there are some limitations that we expect to resolve for general availability.
Updating a payment method opens a new tab.
The customer portal opens your default checkout URL when customers choose to update a payment method for a subscription. We'll bring updating payment methods into the portal before general availability.
Subscription management links remain unchanged.
For the developer preview, subscription management links returned by the Paddle API and included in emails from Paddle don't use the customer portal. We'll update them to use the customer portal before general availability.
Customer portal links are unauthenticated.
You can grab a link to the customer portal for your account in the Paddle dashboard. Customers need to sign in when they use your link. In the future, you'll be able to use the API to generate authenticated links for a customer, meaning you can sign them in to the portal automatically as part of workflows in your app.
Customers can't pause subscriptions.
Customers can see and cancel subscriptions, and see when subscriptions are paused or scheduled to pause, but they can't yet pause subscriptions themselves.
What do we need from you?
For the developer preview, we're asking Paddle platform users to test the customer portal themselves to understand how it works. We don't recommend you share customer portal links with all of your customers, though you might like to share with some trusted customers to get their thoughts.
We're keen to hear about how you feel the customer portal works, as well as any feedback from any customers using the customer portal. To send us feedback, use the feedback button at the top-right or email us at sellers@paddle.com. We may contact you during the developer preview to get your thoughts.
How do I get it?
What's the timeline for release?
We're planning to release the customer portal in multiple stages.
Stage 1 | Customer portal in developer preview for Paddle platform user feedback. |
Stage 2 | General availability. Subscription management links use the customer portal and payment method update is part of the portal. |
We'll email you before general availability to let you know about any changes you might need to make to your integration.
Next steps
The customer portal is fully hosted by Paddle, meaning you don't need to do anything to use it. To start testing:
Open a checkout for your sandbox account and use the test card details to make a test purchase.
Go to Paddle > Business settings > Customer portal, then copy your customer portal URL and paste it into your browser address bar.
Use the email address that you used for your test purchase to sign in to customer portal.
You shouldn't need to make major changes to your implementation to start testing the customer portal, but you should:
Make sure your default payment link page is correct.
Right now, the customer portal opens your default payment link to update payment details. Make sure your default payment URL points to a page that includes Paddle.js.
Upload a logo.
The customer portal uses the same logo that's used in emails sent from Paddle for things like receipts and subscription renewals. Contact the Paddle seller support team at sellers@paddle.com to add a logo to your account, if you don't already have one.
We've updated our docs with information about the new customer portal, see: Customer portal