Recommended Rails plugins for software as a service app

I am investigating potential Rails plugins or Gems to help develop a SAAS type app. Specifically I am looking for help in two areas:

1. Restricting access to certain areas of the app based on the account's plan. For example, a bronze account allows access to some functionality, upgrading to silver unlocks access to new features and functionality. Basically, just controlling what accounts have access to what controllers.

2. Managing subscriptions, invoicing and taking payments. This app will be charging on an annual or quarterly basis, there's a 30 day free trial with no payment details needed up front, and I think the intention is to use PayPal Website Payments Pro (although that is not set in stone).

Given the above, can anyone recommend any Gems or plugins? I have had a look at the SAAS Railskit and I am not opposed to spend开发者_如何转开发ing a bit of money. However, I'd certainly want to hear good things from people who have used it first, and also how easy it is to pick appart the Railskit and apply it to my own application (as I am not starting from scratch here - needs to integrate with Authlogic too).

Thanks in advance for your help.

Bruno Bornsztein offers a Rails engine that implements a SaaS site. Look for striped_rails on GitHub.

You might want to look at the open source example application for a Rails Membership/Subscription/SaaS Site from the RailsApps project. It comes with a tutorial that explains the implementation in great detail. It does what you describe using Devise for authentication and Stripe for billing.

My SaaS Rails Kit does integrate well with pre-existing apps... many of my customers do that. And the testimonials at the site are real. :) Plus there are many other similar testimonials that I haven't published -- a lot of good things have been said about it. :)

While there are quite a few different gems out there which do different things different ways, I would definitely suggest that you start with these:

• activemerchant — I would use this for payment processing. It is honestly the best (and most extensible) gem out there, and its especially well-tested for PayPal usage, although I'd look elsewhere for SaaS billing because PayPal is utter crap.

• declarative_authorization — This is probably the most extensible plugin for authorization, which allows different users with different roles to do different things. For instance, you can build roles for each plan.

You should also take a look at the following Railscasts:

• "Declarative Authorization" - http://railscasts.com/episodes/188-declarative-authorization
• "Authorization with CanCan" - http://railscasts.com/episodes/192-authorization-with-cancan
• "PayPal Express Checkout" - http://railscasts.com/episodes/146-paypal-express-checkout
• "Integrating Active Merchant" - http://railscasts.com/episodes/145-integrating-active-merchant

Hope this helps!

You would also need subdomain routes, for restricting your user into its own subdomain.