Add a Billing API

Now let’s get started with creating our billing API. It is going to take a Stripe token and the number of notes the user wants to store.

Add a Billing Lambda

Start by installing the Stripe NPM package. Run the following in the root of our project.

$ npm install --save stripe

Create a new file called billing.js with the following.

import stripePackage from "stripe";
import handler from "./libs/handler-lib";
import { calculateCost } from "./libs/billing-lib";

export const main = handler(async (event, context) => {
  const { storage, source } = JSON.parse(event.body);
  const amount = calculateCost(storage);
  const description = "Scratch charge";

  // Load our secret key from the  environment variables
  const stripe = stripePackage(process.env.stripeSecretKey);

  await stripe.charges.create({
    source,
    amount,
    description,
    currency: "usd",
  });

  return { status: true };
});

Most of this is fairly straightforward but let’s go over it quickly:

• We get the storage and source from the request body. The storage variable is the number of notes the user would like to store in his account. And source is the Stripe token for the card that we are going to charge.

• We are using a calculateCost(storage) function (that we are going to add soon) to figure out how much to charge a user based on the number of notes that are going to be stored.

• We create a new Stripe object using our Stripe Secret key. We are going to get this as an environment variable. We do not want to put our secret keys in our code and commit that to Git. This is a security issue.

• Finally, we use the stripe.charges.create method to charge the user and respond to the request if everything went through successfully.

Note, if you are testing this from India, you’ll need to add some shipping information as well. Check out the details from our forums.

Add the Business Logic

Now let’s implement our calculateCost method. This is primarily our business logic.

Create a libs/billing-lib.js and add the following.

export function calculateCost(storage) {
  const rate = storage <= 10
    ? 4
    : storage <= 100
      ? 2
      : 1;

  return rate * storage * 100;
}

This is basically saying that if a user wants to store 10 or fewer notes, we’ll charge them $4 per note. For 11 to 100 notes, we’ll charge $2 and any more than 100 is $1 per note. Since Stripe expects us to provide the amount in pennies (the currency’s smallest unit) we multiply the result by 100. Clearly, our serverless infrastructure might be cheap but our service isn’t!

Configure the API Endpoint

Let’s add a reference to our new API and Lambda function.

Open the serverless.yml file and append the following to it.

  billing:
    # Defines an HTTP API endpoint that calls the main function in billing.js
    # - path: url path is /billing
    # - method: POST request
    handler: billing.main
    events:
      - http:
          path: billing
          cors: true
          method: post
          authorizer: aws_iam

Make sure this is indented correctly. This block falls under the functions block.

Now before we can test our API we need to load our Stripe secret key in our environment.