Paid Registration Plugin/Hack

Hi folks, looking for some words of wisdom.

I’m in the midst of re-working an old site that has been on Drupal (and hence, quite neglected for some years) over to WP. One of the main things that I need to accomplish is create a registration process that allows an end user to select a free account or a paid subscription account. I’ve looked at a number of the available membership plugins and can’t find the right combination of features, payment gateways and simplicity.

So, here’s the idea and maybe someone can tell me if I’m on the right track or crazy.

If I create a plugin that provides a customized registration process, I should be able to highjack the registration between the submission and writing the new user to the database and interject a subscription payment process. Then, once payment is done (or a limited free account is chosen), insert the user with specific user meta data to help track their status. Status data can be updated by a different routine, later on.

Something like this:
Reg form w/subscription choice -> payment (if required) -> insert user

Some questions:
Can I use wp_login_form and inject my own process before the user is save to the db or will I need to create my own form?

I seem to recall that one of the user insert functions sends the “welcome” email and one doesn’t (wp_create_user or wp_insert_user ). Docs don’t mention the welcome email.

Thanks for any help!