What is the best way to subscribe my users to a plan that renews monthly yet bills yearly using stripe subscriptions, as i contacted Stripe's support and they said a plan with an interval of month and interval_count of 12 will not generate any events (ex: customer.subscription.updated event) until the end of the 12 months interval while i need these events to be generated on monthly basis.
The best solution here would be to subscribe the customer to a $0 monthly plan. This ensures that, each month, a new billing cycle starts and a new invoice is created. The invoice will be for $0 but send an invoice.created event to your webhook endpoint.
There, you can decide whether you need to bill the customer anything or not. If you don't, you simply ignore the event and the customer won't be charged anything. If you do, you will simply add an invoice item for the correct amount to this invoice. This is covered in the Invoices section of Stripe's documentation.
For the first invoice, you would add the invoice item first which means three steps:
Create the customer
Create the invoice item for the correct price
Create the subscription to the $0 monthly plan
The last step will automatically pull the invoice item in the invoice and charge them that amount as expected.
If you have follow up questions, I'd recommend talking to Stripe's support here.
Related
We have a free subscription concept separate from Stripe. When a user signs up for a paid subscription we want to charge them immediately but still honor any remaining free-period.
I know I can use trial period to delay the start of the Stripe subscription, but we wanted to charge immediately to confirm valid credit card details. Is it possible to give a discount on a new subscription instead, to account for the users remaining free-time?
For example, if
today is the 1st
user has free subscription until 15th
monthly subscription is $10
I would like to charge them $5 today and immediately begin their subscription in Stripe with a Stripe renewal on the next 1st.
Easiest way to do this is to add an invoice item for the amount you want to charge and set a trial period until you want the renewing charge to occur (so in your example you set a trial_end for the next 1st of month). This will generate an initial invoice with the invoice item and then set your recurring payment as you desire.
My application allows a customer to purchase credits for later in-app use.
I want to enable customers to buy credits throughout the month, and only get billed at the end of the month.
Should I be using a Stripe Subscription at an amount that equals the price of one credit, and change the quantity according to the number of credits the customer purchased?
(After a successful invoice - I'll reset the subscription quantity to 0)
Is there a better solution? Perhaps some clever method of using Stripe Checkout?
Your proposed approach sounds reasonable.
I've not tried it but an alternative I can think of would use a free plan and the Invoice Items part of the API.
Create a free plan with amount with amount field set to 0. As far as I can see from the docs, all the subscription lifecycle webhooks should be triggered for Customers who're subscribed to the plan.
Through the month, create InvoiceItems for the Customer. According to the docs, at the end of the billing cycle, those InvoiceItems are added to the customer's invoice.
Sometimes you want to add a charge or credit to a customer but only actually charge the customer's card at the end of a regular billing cycle. This is useful for combining several charges to minimize per-transaction fees or having Stripe tabulate your usage-based billing totals.
Beyond that, you'll want to consider if you should have Stripe generate/email your invoices.
I don't think this is the way to go, because subscriptions are billed the first time among other things.
The recommanded way is: stripe doc: Place a hold on a card
summary
You first ask authorization for a certain amount (the max amount). Eg: 1000$
Your custommer buy 50 credits in the month
At the end of the month you charge the customer for 50$ (it can not be greater that the maximum you authorized in the first step)
That's all :)
I have a subscription plan on stripe, and use this for per seat pricing.
The specific use case is:
Customer has previously paid and so has customer id and subscription id in the database
They remove all of their users one month
The next month they add a user again
I want the end date to have been updated to the end of the current month when the bill period rolls over, so that I don't display a message saying they didn't pay for previous bill period.
In the stripe subscription object, can I set the quantity for the subscription to 0, meaning the customer won't get billed?
If I do this, will the webhook for invoice.payment_succeeded still be called? This allows me to update information in the database.
Is there a different webhook I should be using for this?
Yes if you will set quantity of subscription to 0 then still a zero dollar invoice still come in payment_succeeded webhook and will update the invoice.
Trying to engineer a payment system with stripe that will bill the customer on a weekly basis. The customer can have as many documents but each one is charged weekly. So if the customer has 2 documents he would have 2 charges every week until he canceled both or one of them. I would like to be able to have a detailed email invoice too.
Would the best way to do this would just keep updating the subscription quantity every time one is added or deleted. Or is there a better way to do this.
AKA: I am new to online payments
You can create the plan on Stripe with a validity of 7 days and subscribed the customer to that plan on the recurring basis. So the customer will be charged automatically every week.
For the quantity, you can change the quantity of subscription on stripe or you can subscribe a customer to different weekly plans(If you have different documents rate)
For sending an email just enable invoice email from admin setting and each time customer will pay an email will be sent.
I am integrating stripe to enable the user to subscribe to a physical product shipping to the US and Canada.
I want to use the invoice.created webhook to modify the invoice and add a shipping charge depending on the delivery address.
The problem according to stripe docs is that the first invoice is charged immediately, implying that I cannot modify it prior to the first charge as I could with the subsequent.
If this is so, then the only way around this I believe is to add plans for us and canada for each of the subscription intervals e.g product-weekly-us, product-monthly-us, product-weekly-ca, product-monthly-ca instead of just product-monthly, product-weekly
The shipping would then be static (no line item) and part of the total.
Edit
So looking into invoices from koopajah's answer, here is what I can work out (please confirm):
Create the invoice items for your customer (pending invoice items) - does this exclude the line item for the subscription?
Create the subscription for the customer (which adds those pending invoice items to the new invoice for the subscription) - this will fire invoice.created webhook, which you would have to inspect and ignore - would you have to track the invoice numbers? **edit: oh wait! It would be closed, so you can just check that :D **
All subsequent invoices are modified with the invoice.created webhook for open invoices
If you want to keep using Invoice Items you just have to create one for the first cycle before creating your user subscription. Then once the subscription is created the first invoice will be created and automatically pick up the Invoice Item for your current customer.
You can then create the next Invoice Items in the webhook as you planned to do.
EDIT:
The steps would be something like that:
Create a Customer with the Stripe token
Create an Invoice Item for this customer for the shipping amount (not the subscription one)
Create the subscription for this customer which will automatically add the Invoice Item created at step 2 to the total charge
6.... In the webhook "invoice.created" check whether the invoice is closed and if not repeat step 2 also adding the current invoice identifier to the invoice parameter