Fovea's billing service is gradually being replaced by Iaptic. It's a new better version of the same service, backward compatible, but distributed with different conditions.
What is the relation between Fovea and Iaptic?
In August 2020, iaptic SAS acquired the rights to distribute Fovea's Billing service. Being a company incorporated in France, it made it easier to access a number of services and build trust with our customers.
Fovea will continue to handle every technical aspects, while Iaptic handles the commercial side of the project. That is why we're rebranding our service as iaptic, a better name that also matches what you see on your invoices.
What has changed (or will)?
I you have already been using Fovea.Billing, here's a summary of what changed with the introduction of iaptic.com and what didn't.
New domain
validator.fovea.ccis nowvalidator.iaptic.com.billing.fovea.ccis nowiaptic.com.
API v3
Iaptic introduces a version 3 of the REST API. It features some major changes:
- Customers are now associated with Purchases instead of Receipts.
- As such, different customers can own products that are in the same receipt.
- Customizable entitlement strategy.
- Manual association of purchases with customers.
- Can also be done from the dashboard.
v2 and v1 API endpoints are still available through a compatibility layer.
Teams
Administrators can add other member to their Team, those users can access the data for your application.
Google Subscription V2
Our server now validates google receipts for subscriptions using their newly introduced subscriptionv2 API. It's compatible with the new subscription model introduced in May 2022, which gives more options for the pricing of subscription products.
It also changes the way subscription is identified. Google now recommends using the purchase token as a primary identifier. The orderId is now omitted from free trials so it cannot be used as a primary identifier anymore.
If you're using the purchaseId field from our API, beware that the update can break this part of the code.
Apple Server-to-Server Notifications V2
Version 2 of Apple server-to-server notifications is supported. This new version includes additional data and more purchase events types.
Braintree
The backend logic required to perform payments using Braintree (from PayPal) is now supported. Check this tutorial for an example use case.
Webhook Notifications
Many have asked for a simpler way to build purchase analytics and react to various events in the subscription lifecycle. Iaptic now includes a notification field that provides the reason for the webhook call. Check the Webhook documentation for more details.
Pricing
Plans now have 2 distinct limits: a maximum number of transactions and number of requests per month. Some free apps are making lot of receipt validation requests (counted in millions) but haven't got many that subscribers (if any), those despite the cost to our infrastructure were still eligible for our free plan. This should encourage those users to optimize their usage of our API.
For our loyal users that are already subscribed to Fovea's silver plan:
- You can wait to upgrade to iaptic plans until January 1st, 2024.
- A 50% discount is available on request.
Some features like "Teams" will also only be available to PRO and BUSINESS subscribers.
Check out our Pricing page for details.
How will the migration happen?
The system is backward compatible, so we can simply start forwarding all requests from your application to the new system, just contact us if you'd like us to. However, if you'd rather do a bit of testing before, check the steps below.
Step 0
Your data from Fovea.Billing is already available in iaptic.com. You can login with the same username and password and enjoy the new dashboard. Databases are synchronized 1-way, so data added through the old version of the service will also be available in iaptic.com.
Step 1 - test your client
- Use "https://validator.iaptic.com" instead of "https://validator.fovea.cc" as your validation URL.
Make sure all works as expected. If you're using the server-to-server API, update your servers' API calls before publishing the client update.
Step 2 - update your server
Make API requests to https://validator.iaptic.com. You can update your code to use API v3, it's recommended but optional: version 1 and 2 of the API are still available.
If there was only one good reason to upgrade to v3, it would be that it's better at tracking user entitlements. In the native platforms, there is no such thing as a "receipt identifier". Fovea did its best at generating one in order to track the receipts and their updates so we can update the users' collection of purchases. But there were cases when it did not work properly.
Linking users to purchases instead of receipts solves the issue. The concept of receipt is now only used internally as a mean to refresh purchases.
Step 3 - update Apple/Google notifications URL
Update Apple and Google's server-to-server notification URLs on their respective interfaces.
Step 4 - force all users to iaptic
We have the ability to forward all traffic from your app to the new system. Contact us to request this redirection for your application.
Invisible changes
We updated our internal infrastructure to a solution that will be more resilient to failure.
When will the Fovea.Billing website go away?
It will not go away. The old version of the service will remain live until 2024. Eventually, we will redirect requests from *.fovea.cc to iaptic.com, so everyone will be migrated to the new version of the service. Except complex uses of our API, everything is mostly backward compatible, so this will be invisible to the users.