✨ Add one time purchases to customer state

[jd-solanki]

Hi 👋🏻

I recently began using Polar and discovered that the customer state API returns subscription and usage-based billing information, but it doesn’t include one-time purchase data. This has two drawbacks:

1. Developers need to make two API calls: first, they need to fetch the customer state to obtain the Polar customer ID, and then they need to fetch the orders based on the Polar customer ID.
2. While creating products, we consolidate subscriptions and one-time purchases, but when we retrieve them we have to fetch from two different endpoints.

I hope this explanation clarifies the situation and makes developer life easier.

Best Regards,
JD Solanki

[rishi-raj-jain]

they need to fetch the customer state to obtain the Polar customer ID

can you share what do you mean by this? to get the customer state, you need to provide the customer ID (vs to obtain the Polar customer ID)

[jd-solanki]

Hi Rishi 👋🏻

Initially, I was going to add you in cc, but I didn't want to bother you but here you are 😇

I'm building nuxtjs starter-kit which has a billing page which shows their plan, depended on one-time payments, subscriptions or credit based usage. I can get subscriptions & credit based usage from customer state API however, this API doesn't return data for one one-time purchase product. The goal is to show the order placed for one-time purchase product.

For now, I'm using customer state to get internal id and then making API call to orders. I haven't finished this yet, but now I can receive the orders for one-time purchases in it.

I'm going to use customer state via external id.

[frankie567]

The mai goal of the customer state is to give a "snapshot" of the current customer state — in particular, "What they should have access to in the product?".

If we start to add orders, it'll become really huge (each subscription cycle creates an order!), and we'll need to send an update webhook almost constantly.

If the goal is to create a customer portal, then I think the right way to go is to use the other API to retrieve the data as needed. No problem with that.

If the goal is to check whether the customer has a particular access to something after a one-time purchase, then I would recommend to rely on a custom benefit. The state embeds all granted benefits, no matter if they come from a one-time purchase or a subscription.

[jd-solanki]

Glad to talk to you Frankie. I'm glad to see people I used to know in python/fastapi ecosystem created polar ❤️

Here's what I did.

• created one time fixed price product in polar
• bought by user
• now when I make API call for user's customer state it I assume it list products customer bought (not all orders specifically)

I we rely on benefit then what do you recommend to put under benefit for one time purchase?

I raised added this feedback primarily becuse with customer state we can know about their subscriptions & credit based usage but not one-time purchased products.

If we can know about one time purchase product along with customer state (not all orders like subscription payments just purchased products) then we can fetch the state on inital page load and rely on it to render UI and only make specific API calls in admin panel when needed. E.g. Orders page uses orders API but only when user navigates to that page in admin panel.