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How Self-Serve Sign-up Works

Self-serve sign-up lets somebody arrive at the site, design an app, create an account, confirm their e-mail address and start a paid subscription, all without talking to anybody. Each sign-up becomes its own tenant with its own plan, and the person who signed up manages the subscription from the Admin Panel. This article explains the pieces and who does what; the rest of this section covers each one in detail.

Where to find it

Admin Panel → Account:

  • Billing & Plan — the account owner's plan, trial, usage, AI credit and payment actions

Admin Panel → AI:

  • AI Credit — the plan's included AI credit and top-ups
  • AI Builder — change the app by describing it

Architect Panel → Subscriptions:

  • Tenant Plans — one row per tenant: plan, status, trial and period dates, sign-up state

Architect Panel → Activity:

  • Usage Limit Notices — every usage warning sent to an account
  • API Calls per Day — each tenant's API calls counted against its daily allowance

Who it is for

Self-serve sign-up is how ActiveManage sells its own Starter and Pro plans. The plans, their limits and the payment set-up are part of the platform, not something you configure per installation or per tenant: there is no screen for creating your own plans or prices, and a tenant cannot offer self-serve sign-up to its own customers. Enterprise is arranged and invoiced directly and is never self-served.

So there are two audiences for this section. If you are the account owner of an app you signed up for, the articles on the sign-up journey, plans and limits, Billing & Plan, and payment problems are for you. If you run the installation, the articles on switching it on and on Tenant Plans and the sweep are for you.

The pieces

  • The sign-up wizard at the site's /onboarding/ address: seven questions that design the app, a plan choice, then account creation.
  • Registration and e-mail confirmation: the visitor creates a local account, with a reCAPTCHA check, and confirms their address from a one-time link before anything is built.
  • Checkout: a card is taken through Stripe, with a 14-day free trial for a first subscription. The first payment is taken when the trial ends.
  • The tenant: built from the design, with the sign-up's account as its first administrator, and opened as soon as Checkout completes.
  • Billing & Plan: where the owner changes plan, updates the card, cancels, resumes and buys AI credit.
  • Usage limits: editors, datastores, records, file storage and API calls, enforced as things are created.
  • The lock: an app whose subscription has ended or is unpaid is closed to everybody except the people who can fix it.
  • The sweep: a daily task that reminds, then removes, sign-ups that were built and never paid for.

The billing owner

The billing owner is the account that signed up. Only the billing owner can start Checkout, manage payment details, buy AI credit, resume a paused subscription or discard an unfinished sign-up. Other administrators of the app see "Ask the person who manages this account's subscription." ActiveManage staff see the billing screens read-only. Each billing owner gets one free trial in total, however many apps they create.

How it fits together

  1. A visitor designs an app in the wizard and chooses Starter or Pro.
  2. They create an account and confirm their e-mail address.
  3. The app is built as a new tenant, recorded on Tenant Plans with sign-up state "building", then "built".
  4. They pay through Stripe Checkout and return straight into the new app's Site Administration, already signed in.
  5. Stripe keeps the plan's status up to date: trialing, active, past due, cancelled. Tenant Plans mirrors it, and access follows it.

Worked example

A volunteer co-ordinator finds the site, describes a volunteer rota app in the wizard and picks Starter. They register, click the link in the confirmation e-mail, and enter a card at Checkout. They land in their new app's Site Administration with a 14-day trial. Two months later their charity adds four more administrators; Starter includes one editor, so they upgrade to Pro from Manage billing on Billing & Plan, and the new administrators can be added.

Recommendations

  • Owners: keep the signing-up account; only it can manage billing.
  • Owners: read Plans and Usage Limits before inviting colleagues as administrators.
  • Operators: start in test mode and walk through a full sign-up before taking real payments.
  • Operators: enable the sweep once you have checked its preview.