Customers represent the entities, usually users or organizations, of your application that can use and pay for your products.

For each customer, Autumn will:

  • Keep record of the products they’ve purchased
  • Track the features they’ve used
  • Track the features they have access to
  • Bill them through Stripe for the prices you’ve set

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Creating a customer via API

Customers are automatically created when they interact with any core Autumn endpoint (attach, events, entitled), so explicitly creating them is optional depending on your use case.

However, you may want to explicitly create a customer to keep your code clean and consistent. You can do so with the customers method.

curl -X POST https://api.autumn.com/customers \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer your-api-key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "id": "your-customer-id", 
  "name": "John Doe", 
  "email": "john@example.com", 
  "fingerprint": "unique-device-id"
  }'

Only the id field is required - this should be your unique identifier for the customer that you’ll use to reference them in future API calls.

An Autumn customer does not map to a Stripe customer by default. A Stripe customer will only be created when an attach request is made.

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Creating a customer via the Autumn dashboard

You can also create a customer via the Autumn dashboard. This is useful if you want to “pre-create” a customer for a user who hasn’t interacted with your application yet.

  1. Navigate to the Customers page
  2. Click the “Create Customer” button
  3. Fill in the customer’s details, such as name and email.
    Leave the id field blank, as this will come from your application.
  4. Click “Create Customer”

When the customer logs in for the first time, Autumn will match the user’s email to the customer email you provided above.

Make sure the email you provide is the same email that the customer will use to log in to your application. You can update this from the customer details page.

You can enable a product and set their properties in advance, so that when they do interact with your application, they’re already have the right features available.

This is especially useful for larger or enterprise deals where payment happens separately via invoice.

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Customer Properties

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Customer ID

This is your unique identifier for the customer. You’ll use this ID in all future API calls to reference this customer. It could be:

  • Your database ID for the user
  • Their email address
  • Any other unique identifier in your system

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Name and Email

Optional fields to help identify the customer in the Autumn dashboard and on invoices.

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Fingerprint

An optional unique identifier used to prevent free trial abuse. This could be:

  • Device ID
  • Hardware serial number
  • Browser fingerprint
  • Any other unique identifier that represents the customer’s device or instance

When set, Autumn can limit free trials to one per fingerprint, preventing users from creating multiple accounts to get unlimited free trials.