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I would like to know if anyone is selling subscription “access” to their LMS platform. I know Docebo can be set up to sell courses and catalogs but we want to actually sell an annual subscription to the platform itself and all the content within. We have courses but our real value is in our content - hundreds of resources to be used by teachers in the classroom. Most users come for the content, not necessarily the courses. Here’s a little more background. 

Our users are school districts and afterschool providers that use our content to learn about SEL and how to implement it in their classroom or program, and get tools and resources to use with kids. Currently we use a “direct sales” model and new users are added/imported manually with their expiration date. The annual subscription/renewal is all handled outside the system manually. We’d like to implement a SaaS- like subscription model where we sell various levels of access for an annual subscription fee - like organization access (with multiple users) for one price and an individual access for another price. So we would put a pricing sheet and buy button on our website, integrate with Hubspot for lead gen, marketing and comm, Stripe or something like it for payment processing, and then I am assuming use the API to have a new user added with appropriate expiration when a purchase is made. Is anyone doing anything like this? If so, did you have external help with the implementation? We are small org with no inhouse tech/IT so it will be a big lift for us. I have only a cursory knowledge of the process and technology and will need to go looking for assistance. It would be helpful to talk with someone who might have tackled this use case. Thanks.

@Cindy McElhinney we sell access to our platform for our users and have something similar to your use case.  The subscription purchase is not handled within the platform though, it is external, so there is some administration that we have to manage in terms of new subscriptions. 

 

We are a small team though, and we cannot manage all the administration that comes with our subscribing customers. Our workaround is putting user creation and subscription license/seat management in the hands of our customers with select power users.

 

We have not done anything very cool with APIs but I am happy to share our use case and how we have it set up in our platform. Send me a private message and we can chat if you would like. :grin:


If you are on the Enterprise plan, i think you can use the public catalog to display subscriptions for access to you platform as a License. Am thinking you can enable self-registration that would place the user in a ‘pending state” and an admin could approve the request and provide access based on the purchase…?? Haven't actually tried this all together but have tested each function independently and they all work well. Interesting use case


@lrnlab Thanks for the insight on the Enterprise plan. We are on Growth plan so maybe one day we will “grow” into Enterprise. At any rate, certainly worth comparing pricing if it could work with the pricing of other tech required to do it outside of Docebo. Adding this consideration to my research. Thanks again.


We do this but our solution is a bit more complex than what you’re looking for.
We have access to e-learning integrated into our software bundle subscriptions (https://ultimaker.com/software/enterprise-software#software-comparison-summary-53011). Users have to create a separate account that can be used for all our software products (OAuth, integrated with Open ID Connect into Docebo). 

The subscription level is mapped to additional fields in Docebo, and these additional fields are used to assign users to groups automatically. And depending on your group, you see different content (using menus, pages and catalogs). 

This involved quite a few teams from R&D and IT and took quite a while to set up. 

I hope this makes sense… I’m thinking it might make more sense if I recorded a quick screencast of our backend setup… let me know if you’re interested.


@Ceeee Thanks so much for sharing your use case and a link to your purchase page. That was helpful to see. Don’t want to trouble you for screencast. I am curious though as to what you are using for payment processing on the backend.


@Ceeee your scenario sounds very similar to what I am envisioning for our subscription plan roll-out. Since our subscription will include product support, services, and other things in addition to training, then the purchase of the subscription will occur outside of Docebo. We will just need to pass a field either from Salesforce (we already have a custom integration in place) or our IDP, wherever the subscription level is being stored.


@Cindy McElhinney, as you know subscriptions are a huge part of our business. We aren’t there yet with discovery, but when we are we’ll be digging deep into it. I’m following this thread and will be glad to discuss more when we get to it. You can also help give the customer perspective.  :grin:


Hi Cindy, as you can see...a very common expectation of an LMS now days. However, it does take some customization and expertise. eSkillz can definitely help you out with this. It might just be worth a conversation at least to firm up the requirements. Just a thought


HI @Cindy McElhinney ! 

Just wanted to follow up to see if you mind sharing the approach/set up your organization ended up settling with to support your subscription model?

 

Thanks :) 
 


@kimngo_ac Thanks for the inquiry. We still haven’t yet figured it out. Right now we are prototyping a subdomain wordpress site to handle the subscription purchase and login. The user will be able to access a ton of our resources that are similar “blog-like” content in the wordpress site and then access the courses from a link to the LMS. We also have a considerable process flow around signing up for our content -- various pop-ups and lightboxes to encourage upgrading from a free account so it looks like wordpress with a member plug in is a better way to go for us. This whole build out is a heavy lift for us-- we are a very small organization with no technical staff and little in the way of budget to source it out. So we are making slow progress. If you want to discuss further, message me and we can set up a time to chat.  


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