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Getting Started
Welcome to Archway. This guide takes you from nothing to a working storefront that sells your product subscriptions to your customers, with the payments going straight into your own Stripe account.
Start here. This is where you create your account and subscribe to Archway.
The steps at a glance:
- Create your account
- Subscribe to Archway
- Create your tenancy - your company's own space, with its own address
- Connect your Stripe account
- Publish your products and prices
- Try your store as a customer, then go live
- Optional extras - sign-in options, a second administrator, connecting your own software
Allow about 30-45 minutes for steps 1-6. You can stop after any step and pick up where you left off.
You will need:
- A modern browser - Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox, kept up to date.
- An email address you can receive mail at.
- A card to pay for your Archway subscription.
- A Stripe account for your company, activated for live payments - that is, with your business details and the bank account your customers' payments should be paid out to. Stripe walks you through this when you activate the account. You can set Archway up with Stripe's test keys first and switch to live ones when you are ready (step 6).
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Open the Archway address above. The first thing you are asked for is your region - choose the one closest to you.
About the list. The regions on offer are the ones where our payment provider supports business bank accounts, because that is what decides where a SaaS company can actually be paid. It governs where your company can be based - not where your customers can be. They can be anywhere.
If your country is not listed, please get in touch - more regions are being added.
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Choose Sign Up and fill in your name, email address, password, time zone and language.
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Sign in with the email address and password you just used.
Your Archway subscription is what lets you open a storefront of your own.
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Open the Store. You will see the products on offer with their plans and prices.
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Choose an Archway plan, add it to your Cart and check out. You are handed to Stripe's secure payment page to pay.
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After paying you are returned to Archway. Open My Subscriptions and check your new subscription is listed and active. Keep this page open - the next step starts from it.
A tenancy is your company inside Archway. It owns your workspaces, your products and your customers - and it gets its own address, which is where your customers will shop.
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On your Archway subscription, choose Create Tenancy.
The button appears on the Archway subscription only - if it seems to be missing, check which subscription you are looking at.
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Fill in the details it asks for. One of them is your subdomain, and it decides your address:
a subdomain of
yourcompanygives youhttps://yourcompany.live.us.app.archwayportal.comChoose it carefully - short, lowercase and recognisably yours. It is the address you will give your customers, and the name your own software uses to talk to Archway.
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Archway creates the tenancy, refreshes the subscription, and gives you a button to open your new tenancy. Click it - that takes you to your own address, and everything from here happens there.
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Your new address asks you to choose a region first. That is expected - the region is recorded per tenancy, because your storefront serves your customers from it.
If you briefly see a "maintenance" message while your tenancy is being created, that is expected too. Archway is preparing your tenancy's own database. It clears itself within moments - there is nothing to do but wait.
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Sign in again at your new address, with the same email address and password. You are the tenancy's owner. Your sign-in does not follow you from one address to another - each tenancy is its own storefront, which is exactly how your customers will experience yours.
Archway takes payments through your Stripe account, so your customers' money goes straight to you.
Everything you set up as an owner lives in Tenant Center, reachable from the menu once you are signed in at your tenancy's address: your payment provider, your products and your prices.
👉 Payment providers - add your Stripe account for each region you sell into, with its test and live keys. Leave Live Mode off for now.
This step is what opens your store. Until a payment provider is linked and active for a region, your storefront will not open for visitors in it.
Products and prices live in Tenant Center too.
👉 Products - create a product, add a price, approve it, and check it in your Store.
Before you send customers to your store, buy from it yourself.
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Sign out.
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Go to your own address -
https://yourcompany.live.us.app.archwayportal.com- and sign up there with a different email address, as a plain customer. -
Buy one of your products. With Live Mode still off, use one of Stripe's test cards - no real money moves:
Purpose Card number Expiry CVC Payment succeeds 4242 4242 4242 4242any future date any 3 digits Payment is declined 4000 0000 0000 0002any future date any 3 digits -
Check the subscription appears under that customer's My Subscriptions, and the payment appears in your Stripe dashboard's test data.
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Go live. Sign back in as the owner and switch your payment provider's Live Mode on - see Go live. From now on your store takes real payments, paid out to your Stripe account.
Your store is open. Share your address - https://yourcompany.live.us.app.archwayportal.com - with your customers.
👉 Authentication providers - let people sign in to your store with another service instead of a password.
The tenancy owner - you - can hand day-to-day administration to someone else. On your tenancy in Tenant Center, choose Change Admin and enter the email address the person uses for their Archway account - they need to have signed up already. They get administrator access to the tenancy; ownership stays with you.
If your product is software, it can check for itself whether a customer's subscription is active - when they sign in, when it starts, or a few times a day.
Every customer account and every subscription in Archway has a secret key. Your customer can copy both at once with Copy Keys at the top left of the subscription (or the account's alone with Copy Key on their customer account), and enter them into your software. See the API integration guide for the details, with examples in many programming languages and for no-code tools such as Zapier.
- Finding things in long lists. Sections that can hold many rows - subscriptions, products, customers - have a search button beside the expander arrow. Type a few letters and press Enter; clearing the box brings the full list back. A section shows up to 100 entries, so on a long list search is the way to reach the rest.
- Lists keep the order you set. Rows that have an order of their own - a product's plans, prices and features - are listed in that order, not the order they were added in.
- Help. Where a screen has a help page, a ? button at the top right opens it in a new tab. On a subscription it opens the help for that subscription's product.
- Cancelling takes up to an hour to take effect. A subscription shows as cancelled straight away, but what it paid for can keep working for up to an hour.
- Error messages are deliberately brief. If something goes wrong you will usually see "Something went wrong. Please try again." rather than technical detail - that belongs in our logs, not on your screen. If it keeps happening, get in touch and tell us the time you saw it.
- On a phone or tablet - Archway works in any modern mobile browser too.
Email support@adaptableapps.net. A couple of sentences is fine.
To help us help you quickly, include:
- What you did - the steps, in order.
- What happened, and what you expected instead.
- When it happened, with your time zone - "about 14:35, SAST" is enough. This is the most important line, because the time is how we find the details in our logs.
- A screenshot, if the problem is something you can see.
- Your browser and device - "Chrome on Windows", "Safari on iPhone".
Never include your password or your Stripe secret keys. We will never need either of them to look into something.