Getting user's email in add-on

[Finn Smith]

I'm working on a Sheets add-on with premium features. I need to check if the logged-in user has paid. Is getEffectiveUser() the best way to do this in a published add-on?

[Abeer Shaheen]

What is this about.

On Fri, May 10, 2024, 8:10 AM Finn Smith <finnba...@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm working on a Sheets add-on with premium features. I need to check if the logged-in user has paid. Is getEffectiveUser() the best way to do this in a published add-on?

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[Ed Robinson]

Hi Finn,

Can you clarify your question?  You have several options for determining the user identity. 

Are you asking

1. how to get their indentity/email?  or

2. If the user has a paid Google Workspace acct? or

3. how to determine if the user has subscribed to be a paid user of your add-on? 

[Ed Bacher]

Session.getActiveUser().getEmail() or Session.getEffectiveUser.getEmail() will get the user's email address. For details, see https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/base/session. This answers Ed Robinson's Question 1.

I'm interested in Question 2 -- determining if the user has a paid Workspace account.

Question 3 depends on how you are processing payments and saving payment/subscription information.

[Ed Robinson]

Thx Ed. For Q2. See this article by Amit Agarwal.  Their example code shows how to determine if the user is on a paid or free Workspace acct:

https://www.labnol.org/code/20592-gsuite-account-check

Finn: Does this answer your question?

[Ed Bacher]

Thanks, Ed! That code works great (though I've not tested it against a Google Workspace user -- it reports correctly for a Google free account).

[Ed Robinson]

For me, on a Workspace account it works OK, but name is null. Email is OK, and hd is the domain name.

Finn asked the original question. Finn did you get the answer you needed?

[Finn Smith]

Here is the situation I'm imagining:

• John Doe is using the free version of my add-on that he installed through the marketplace.
• John wants the premium features, so he clicks on the link to pay.
• John pays through Stripe.
• Stripe sends a webhook event to my event handler.
• My event handler logs in a database that john...@gmail.com has paid.
• The add-on gets John's email (john...@gmail.com) <--- This is what I'm asking about.
• The add-on checks the database to see if john...@gmail.com has paid. <-- I'll have this happen on install and on open, but I'd also like to hear suggestions on elegant ways to do this right after John has paid. That is, if John has just gone through the check-out flow, how would you suggest I trigger the "has this person paid" check?
• The add-on confirms that the status of john...@gmail.com is active and unlocks premium features.

[Ed Robinson]

For enable/disable premium features, the most important thing is certainty + a stable experience for the user (they've just given you their credit card payment).

If you're processing recurring (eg: monthly) payments, you'll also have to handle expired cards, canceled subscriptions, changed subscriptions.

If you're building an editor add on, you could inform the customer "After you've subscribed, please close and re-open Finns-awesome-addon to enable premium features".

Then check the status and do the enable/disable features in the onopen event.   

This is not as graceful as "lighting up features" in real-time, but is simpler and more robust than polling for a sub, or setting up a webhook. Stripe does support webhooks (see: https://docs.stripe.com/webhooks). This would give the real-time enable-features experience, but it will be more complex to set up.