How WaaS works

Short answer: with GrabWP WaaS, customers sign up on your site and get their own WordPress website, made as a copy of a template you prepare. You decide the plans, the prices and the payment provider. Each customer manages their site, plan and billing from a customer dashboard.

Needs: Pro + WaaS

The five parts of a website service

The setup wizard explains WaaS with these five parts. Every other page in this section is about one of them.

Part	What it is
Template	A ready-made site you design once. You build it in the Starter site step.
Plan	What a customer gets and pays: price per month or year, limits such as storage and backups, an optional free trial.
Signup	On your signup page a customer picks a template and a plan, and creates an account.
Subscription	Their plan, free or billed by the payment provider you connect.
Their own site	A copy of the template, created for them. They manage it from their customer dashboard.

What the customer sees

Template gallery  >  Signup (account, plan, services, payment)  >  Site is built
                                                                        |
                                                              Customer dashboard
                                                       (site, domains, plan, billing)

The visitor opens your template gallery and clicks Get started on a template.
The signup form asks for their name and email (Create your account), then a plan (Choose a plan) and Billing Cycle, then extras (Optional Services), then Payment Method. The payment step is skipped when nothing in the order needs payment.
WaaS builds the site. The customer does not type a site address: WaaS picks a neutral one for them. They can connect their own domain later if their plan allows it.
The customer signs in to the dashboard with their email. With the default sign-in mode, they get a code by email (Send verification code).

You can reorder, hide or relabel the signup steps. See Signup flow.

What runs on your server

Everything lives in one WordPress install: your main site holds the plans, templates, signup pages and billing. Each customer site is a tenant of that install.

+--------------------------------------------------+
|                  YOUR MAIN SITE                  |
|  Plans   Templates (tags, groups, bulk)          |
|  Billing providers   Signup flow presets         |
|  Public pages: /signup /templates /pricing       |
|                /dashboard                        |
+--------------------------------------------------+
                        |
                  Provisioning
                        |
        +---------------+---------------+
        v               v               v
    tenant A        tenant B        tenant C
  (subdomain)     (path URL)     (custom domain)

Customer sites get either a subdomain of your Platform Domain (for example shop.yoursaas.com, needs wildcard DNS and SSL) or a path URL on your main site (for example yoursaas.com/site/site-name/, no DNS needed). This depends on the routing mode you pick in the setup wizard. See Set up WaaS.

The three plugins

WaaS needs all three plugins, activated in this order. Each one depends on the one before it.

Plugin	Role
GrabWP Tenancy (Free)	The multi-site engine: tenant list, create, settings, status, setup wizard. Menu: Tenancy.
GrabWP Tenancy Pro	Database and isolation defaults, backups, storage, license. Adds Pro Settings and License under Tenancy.
GrabWP Tenancy WaaS	Plans, billing, templates, signup, customer dashboard, domains, subscriptions, emails. Menu: Waas.

Payment providers: Polar.sh and WooCommerce are built into WaaS (WooCommerce appears only while the WooCommerce plugin is active). Stripe, Sepay and Xendit are separate add-on plugins. See Payments.

Where things are in wp-admin

The WaaS menu is labeled Waas. Its items are Dashboard, Subscriptions, Domains, Templates and Settings. The Settings screen (title WaaS Settings) has these tabs:

Tab	Page in this section
General	Set up WaaS and WaaS settings
Appearance	Appearance
Signup Flow	Signup flow
Email	Emails
Plans	Plans
Benefits and Services	Benefits, services and add-ons
Billing Providers	Payments
Activity Log and Provisioning	Dashboard, activity log and provisioning
Add-ons	Benefits, services and add-ons

Templates has its own sub-navigation: Templates, Tags, Tag Groups, Bulk. See Templates.

Each signup gets one provisioning record (a provisioning intent) that tracks its progress. In order:

checkout_pending: the customer chose a plan and is paying.
payment_confirmed: payment arrived, or the order needed no payment.
finalizing: the customer account and site record are being prepared.
tenant_created: the site exists.
clone_running: the chosen template is being copied into the new site.
completed: the site is ready.

Two other states exist: failed_retriable (will be tried again) and failed_terminal (stopped).

When a customer says "I paid and have no site", this state tells you where it stopped. Open Waas > Settings > Provisioning to see it. An hourly job re-queues stuck signups, up to 12 retries. You can also retry by hand. See Dashboard, activity log and provisioning.

While a checkout is open, its site address is held for 2 hours, so no other signup can take it.

Limits

Retries, renewals, trial reminders and suspensions run as WordPress scheduled jobs (WP-Cron). They only run when cron runs, so set up a server cron job for a reliable schedule.
Copying a template is a clone of an existing site. The template site must stay in place.

The five parts of a website service​

What the customer sees​

What runs on your server​

The three plugins​

Where things are in wp-admin​

How a signup becomes a site​

Limits​

Related​