Kanuu, and what it duu.

I want to share some progress on one of my products. Kanuu. What it's doing, what problem it's solving, and some plans for the future. My last post before this hiatus was about Kanuu too, but this is going to be coming at it with renewed vigor and some of the most recent changes. This is kind of a Kanuu-state-of-things H1 2021.

First of all, I'm back it's been forever since I've touched my blog. Between 'the world', workload, family etc I all but abandoned my blog - luckily I paid for a year of ghost(pro) 😅

What is Kanuu?

There is a famous saying about 'being up *$%@ creek without a Paddle Kanuu'.

I'm sorry I did that. Moving on.

Kanuu is a managed billing UI that works with Paddle and allows you to forget about writing and maintaining code that lets your customers manage their subscriptions. Your customers can subscribe, update, cancel their subscription, view their invoices, see their last and next payments all from Kanuu, powered by your Paddle account - Kanuu is UI only, all your subscriptions still belong to you.

Kanuu is designed to be as simple as possible to allow your customers to start giving you money. One API call to Kanuu and then a simple redirect lets them access everything they need to subscribe to your product.

How does it work?

To remain completely GDPR compliant Kanuu stores no additional information about your customers. The only thing Kanuu needs is a consistent identifier to identify that customer, something like a database ID or UUID.

With this Kanuu can load all the required information from Paddle, using the API credentials you give us, using that to build a billing UI for your customer.

We then securely load Paddle's SDKs and remain fully Paddle compliant throughout the checkout process. All subscriptions are tied to your Paddle account and you will receive webhooks if you have set them up in Paddle.

Why does it exist?

I enjoy building SaaS products and I enjoy earning money. The one thing I would have to do every damn time was to build a way for my SaaS product to allow people to subscribe - to earn money.

Do you know what isn't fun? Building subscription UIs, over and over again.

Do you know what is even less fun? Maintaining all those subscription UIs.

This is why Kanuu exists so you, and I, don't have to build and maintain subscription UIs and we can focus on building products that excite us without sacrificing potential earnings in the process.

So, what's new?

Well, Kanuu is out of its beta period, there are a number of users who are now actively using Kanuu in real-world applications and the feedback has been incredible to say the least, with feedback comes bug fixes and tweaks. Kanuu is now in a really good place.

Also, we have just launched custom domains for Kanuu subscribers, meaning you can use Kanuu on your own subdomain - think billing.yourapp.com powering your subscription management pages - your customers will never know you are using a managed UI!

What's next up?

I've got plenty of ideas for Kanuu, but the main part is making it even easier for makers to start billing customers; I mentioned Paddle's webhooks earlier, I don't want Kanuu's customers, when building up their product, to have to deal with webhooks. So we are going to build out an API that will let you rapidly access the subscription status of any customer with a simple response that can be understood quickly.

Then outside of some minor or convenience features, the next big thing is our plans to build packages for other languages and frameworks. We already have a Laravel package so then we will be looking at other popular frameworks to make it easy, quick, and accessible for everyone to start billing with Paddle.