A way to gift pet care taker and the like#758

Right now i know you can use someone’s link from /purchase, the payment link, but it ends up sharing a lot of personal detials about who paid, which really sucks.
I.e. on the page mimu brings up for edditing the subscription it shows all the information the person who paid gave, like thier emial, last 4 of their card, ect.

Popping in with my two cents, idk how hard it would be to implement, but I agree that it would be nice if we could gift pet caretaker to people similar to how we can gift nitro and such, so it’s just sending someone a claim link or what have you vs having to essentially dox yourself.

rewriting my response so it’s easier to understand:

this is really tricky to implement the way things are set up right now ;-;

from my side, there are basically three ways to do “gifted subs”:

1. gift credit / gift card style (virtual balance)

   • user A pays → we give user B some kind of internal “credit” or time.
   • this is technically the easiest on our side because it’s just “buy balance, then we decrement it over time.”

2. one payer, different recipient (multiple subs per payer)

   • stripe customer owns multiple subscriptions, but each sub’s benefits go to a different discord user.
   • this is hard for us because right now we map: 1 stripe customer = 1 discord ID.

   • to support this we’d need:

     • a new UI to choose who each sub is for,
     • a new mapping layer between subs <-> discord accounts,
     • plus a lot of edge cases (cancellations, charge failures, transfers, etc.).
   • basically this is a decent-sized rewrite of how we associate subs to users.

3. “gift = countdown timer” (like pet elite)

   • instead of a real subscription, a gift is just “X days of premium” on the recipient, with a countdown.

   • this is closer to how pet elite works, but:

     • we’d have to extend the current system a lot to support both “normal stripe subs” and “gift timers” cleanly,
     • and we’d need clear rules for what happens if the gifted user ALSO subscribes with their own card (stack? override? pause?).
   • so this is less of a rewrite than (2), but still a big extension of the current logic.

the big catch with (1):
stripe needs a payment method for subscriptions. so even if we implemented this as a “gift card / promo code,” the recipient usually still has to put in a card for it to work as a proper subscription. that kind of defeats the whole point if the main use case is “my friend doesn’t have a card,” right T____T

so realistically:

• (1) is only useful if we’re okay with the recipient still needing a payment method.
• (2) means a big rewrite of how we tie stripe customers to discord users.
• (3) means a big extension of our current system and careful handling when gifts and normal subs overlap.

that’s why it’s not a “quick win” feature for us, even though i totally get why people want it. i’m also gonna make a guess that this won’t be used that often as mimu key gifting is only a fraction of our revenue too, so it’s really a hard bargain x.x

I think option 1 wouldn’t be so bad as long as it doesn’t dox the person that bought the credit?
If I’m understanding person A could by credit for person B, and person B would just need to have a card on file to use the credit?
as long as it wouldn’t have to be person A’s credit card so it wouldn’t dox their personal information that would be kinda nice.
I think quite a few platforms require a card on file to use a gifted/trial subscription.

Butting in again, sorry, could another option be something like a mini mimu key? Those seem to be relatively easy to transfer between users, from what I’ve seen, so Person A could buy a mini key that can be exchange for pet caretaker, and then gift to Person B?

I have to disagree with you Samia - i really think that it doesn’t fit the bill well. considering how we have lots of minors on mimu, a lot of them do not have an accessible credit card ): i think majority of people who do have a card at their disposal would not need to be gifted

And the “mini mimu key” suggestion is similar to what I stated in 3, but would require again, a large extension as our subscription-based perks work differently from pet elite, premium, etc.

Ah, gotcha. thank you for the responses! <3

Alright, thank you for the explanation.
I think way 2 sounds feasible ish, but i think it might end up having a similar issue with double subscription? A subscribes on their end for b then b subscribes on their own end.
oh well, at least keys can be gifted.

2 and 3 are both possible solutions but again, a lot of work. The opportunity cost is just currently just not quite there