How Orbulus wires up sign-in, payments and email
Four answers in the wizard decide which services your app is built with. Here’s what each one switches on, and the little you set up yourself.
Most apps need the same few connections to the outside world: a way for people to sign in, a way to take payments and a way to send email. With Orbulus you don’t pick providers or paste API keys for any of them. You answer a few questions in the wizard, and the AI engineers build your app on a starter that already has them wired in. The one account you bring is your own Stripe account, and only if you take payments.
Four answers decide it
Your answers in the wizard become your app’s Charter, the brief the AI engineers build from. Four of them decide which services go in.
- Do users need to sign in?
- Sign-up, sign-in and profiles, through Clerk
- How will your customers pay?
- Payments through Stripe, into your own Stripe account
- Will it send email?
- Email from your app, through Resend
- Does the app store or process data?
- A database for what your app saves
Your answers become the Charter, the AI engineers build from it, and your app comes with sign-in, payments, email and a contact form
Answer no to all four and there’s nothing to sign in to, pay for, email or save, so your app ships as a lightweight static site with no database. That suits a one-page site for a business, and it can still have a contact form.
Sign-in
Answer yes to “Do users need to sign in?” and your app comes with sign-up, sign-in and a profile, provided by Clerk. Sign-in opens in a Clerk window over your app’s own pages, and your app’s server knows which signed-in user each request comes from.
If your app has different kinds of user, list them in the wizard (say, Coach and Athlete) and name the pages each one needs. Both go into the Charter, and the AI engineers build the app around them.
Answer no, and your app has no sign-in at all, which is right for a public site that everyone sees the same way.
Payments
“How will your customers pay?” has four answers.
- No payments
- Free to use
- One-off purchase
- Customers pay once, at a price you set
- Monthly subscription
- Customers pay every month, at a price you set
- Users pay each other
- Not built yet: an app with this answer is built without payments for now
For a one-off purchase or a subscription, you can also say who pays. Leave it blank and every user pays. Name a kind of user, such as Coach, and only coaches pay while everyone else uses the app free.
Where the money goes
Payments go to your own Stripe account. You connect it once, on the Platform page in Orbulus, before your app goes live. Stripe asks you to sign in and approve the connection, so you never give Orbulus a key. Your customers pay on a Stripe Checkout page.
Orbulus takes its fee from each payment as a Stripe application fee.
Email
Answer yes to “Will it send email?” and your app can send email, such as confirmations and notifications, through Resend. Orbulus sets up the sending for you, so there’s no email service to sign up to.
When your app’s pages invite visitors to get in touch, the AI engineers build a real contact form. Orbulus relays each message to you by email, with the visitor’s address as the reply-to, so you answer by replying. The form doesn’t put your email address on the page.
It works on every kind of app Orbulus builds, including a static site with no server of its own. Each app has a daily limit on messages, to keep spam down.
What you set up yourself
- If you take payments, connect your Stripe account on the Platform page
- Add your legal details on the Platform page, for your app’s privacy and terms pages
Orbulus and the AI engineers handle the rest of what this article describes.
Other services
Sign-in, payments, email and the contact form are the integrations Orbulus builds in today. The wizard doesn’t offer connections to other services, such as a calendar, a CRM or a spreadsheet.