I tagged v0.9.0 of LaraFoundry this week: billing. Except the honest headline is that I shipped the billing seam, not billing. The free core now has the whole shape of a subscription system, a payment-gateway contract, a driver manager, a real access gate over subscription columns, and it cannot take a single cent. That is on purpose, and the reason is the most interesting part of the phase.
LaraFoundry is a SaaS core I'm extracting in public from a live CRM, one module at a time. The deal I made with myself early on: the core is free and stays free for everything except money. Auth, multi-tenancy, RBAC, the admin console, the activity log, i18n, files: all free. The day a business wants to charge its customers, that is the paid part. So billing could not just be "another module." It had to split cleanly down a line, with the free side carrying real, useful structure and the paid side carrying the parts that actually move money.
The donor habit I would not carry
Here is what the original CRM did when a company "paid" for its subscription:
// TODO: real payment gateway integration
