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.
I know I can pre-auth a stripe subscription with a trial period. I want to pre-auth the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, nth subscription payment. The info we are sending out is time critical and if their subscription lapses due to NSF or something else, it would be nice for them if they could rectify the problem BEFORE it lapses.
There is a pending invoice you can get for a subscription, and you can create a payment intent with an invoice ID so that when the invoice is paid, the payment intent (that captured the money) will be used to collect the money. BUT the pending invoice doesn't have an ID until one or 2 hours before they try to collect the money which is 3-4 days too late.
Has anyone figured out how to pre-auth subscription payments other than the first one?
Is there a subscription engine I could use (with stripe/paypal/venmo) that would mean I could quit using the deficient stripe subscription system?
Subscription invoices don't exist until the renewal of the billing cycle, and the underlying payment intent is created by the invoice. It's not supported to "pre-auth" subscription payments. Instead, you need to handle payment failures when those occur, optionally by letting Stripe handle that for you.
If you want to have successful payment in advance of some time-sensitive event, then I'd suggest one of two alternatives:
Shift your billing cycle to invoice 3-4 days ahead of what you have set now, allowing you time to recover from payment failures before the delivery timing.
Alternatively you would implement your own recurring payments using saved payment details. You would similarly want to authorize the payment ahead of time to allow for recovery. You could optionally use manual capture to defer capture until the time of delivery.
I am currently in the process of creating the billing system for my first SaaS. A simple tool to generate videos. There will be a free, mid, and pro tier. The main difference will be the number of minutes you can generate per month.
I created 3 Stripe products for the tiers. The free product consists of one price ($0) with a monthly charge interval. The mid and pro tier consists of 2 prices, a monthly and annual charge interval.
When a user signs up for an account, my backend automatically creates a Stripe customer and subscribe it to a free plan. A user can upgrade their account to a mid or pro tier. The plan will be downgraded to a free tier when the user cancels or if the payment failed.
I reset the number of available render minutes after each successful payment, at the start of the billing month. I do this by listening to the successful payment Stripe webhooks. Even when the user is on the free tier, the webhook still gets fired since it is a plan.
The problem is that this method would not work for annual plans.
Which made me think that the method that I went for may not be the correct one.
Do you know if this is a good method if there is a better one and if there is a workaround for annual subscriptions?
Thank you very much for your time.
I think for the annual billing you'll likely want to just set up a cron job or similar that runs daily, and that looks at which annual subscriptions' 'billing day anniversary' (i.e., billing date is Aug 7, so billing day anniversary is the 7th of each month) and resets the counts - unless it is the billing date, in which case leave it to your webhook.
We are using Stripe payment processing for our customer's subscriptions. When users change plans, we want them to be charged immediately for the prorated difference. Stripe does this automatically when plans have different billing intervals but when changing between plans with the same interval, Stripe defers payment till the next billing period.
The way we handle this now is to create an invoice after updating the subscription, but if the billing fails for it fails, we need to do a rollback.
stripe.subscriptions.update(/* change plan */);
if (plans_have_different_billing_intervals) {
try {
stripe.invoices.create(/* for all pending charges */);
} catch (err) {
/* rollback subscription to old plan */
}
}
Overall, this feels wrong and convoluted. Is there an easier/cleaner way to implement this that we aren't seeing?
You can use billing_cycle_anchor set to now when updating a subscription to force it to change the billing cycle and thus always charge the customer immediately. Personally I think this makes a lot more sense. Also this works well with prorating.
await stripe.subscriptions.update(subscription.id, {
billing_cycle_anchor: 'now',
items: [{ id: itemId, plan: planId }]
});
https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/billing-cycle#changing
To immediately charge your users the prorated price difference when the user upgrades, use the proration_behavior='always_invoice' option when modifying the user's subscription. Quoting from the docs:
... In order to always invoice immediately for prorations, pass always_invoice.
Python example:
stripe.Subscription.modify(
subscription_id,
items=[{
'id': item_id,
'plan': plan_id,
}],
# Charge the prorated amount immediately.
proration_behavior='always_invoice',
)
This immediately charges the user a prorated amount when the user changes to a more expensive plan. However, when the user changes to a cheaper plan, the user will be given a prorated credit, making the user's next bill cheaper by the prorated amount.
Scenarios
In these scenarios, suppose the billing date is on the first day of each month. Further suppose that the month has 30 days.
Scenario 1: The user is subscribed to a $5 monthly plan. The user decides to upgrade to a $30 plan on the 22nd day of the month. With 8 days left in the month, the unused portion of the $5 plan is approximately (8 / 30) * 5 = $1.33, and the prorated amount for the $30 plan is (8 / 30) * 30 = $8.00. So the user will be charged 8.00 - 1.33 = $6.67 immediately.
Scenario 2: The user is subscribed to a $30 monthly plan. The user decides to downgrade to a $5 plan on the 22nd day of the month. With 8 days left in the month, the unused portion of the $30 plan is approximately (8 / 30) * 30 = $8.00, and the prorated amount for the $5 plan is (8 / 30) * 5 = $1.33. In this case, the user will not be charged, but the user's next bill (on the next billing date) will be reduced by 8.00 - 1.33 = $6.67.
The example calculations above are only approximate because Stripe prorates to the exact second, not by day.
Side notes
dearsina's answer is correct, but involves at least three API calls rather than one. To explicitly follow the steps in that answer, you could do this instead:
# Step 1 in dearsina's answer: Modify the subscription.
modified_subscription = stripe.Subscription.modify(
subscription_id,
items=[{
'id': item_id,
'plan': plan_id,
}],
)
# Steps 2 and 3: Create and retrieve invoice.
invoice = stripe.Invoice.create(customer=modified_subscription.customer)
# Steps 4 and 5: Finalize and pay invoice.
stripe.Invoice.pay(invoice.id)
But why do this when you could do all the steps in one API call?
To take payment for a change of quantity or subscription plan, you need to do the following:
Update subscription with the new changes.
Create an invoice.
The thing that confused me by this is that Stripe magically knows to only invoice for the updated subscription items, and not for upcoming billing cycle items.
Retrieve the newly created invoice
Finalise the invoice
Take payment for the invoice This assumes that your customer has a payment method stored.
Only when all of the steps have been completed, you've successfully charged for the subscription change (and charged for the change only). You can do it all of it in one go. The customer should get an invoice email from Stripe at the end of it.
As OP says, it gets particularly complicated if the payment fails. The way I see it, you have three choices:
Ignore the failed payment, give the customer access to the service, and hope that they'll pay the next time payment is attempted.
Roll-back the subscription upgrade, warn the customer that payment failed.
Put the entire subscription on hold until the customer pays.
I'm only mentioning #3 because at times, the subscription upgrade process may be complicated. And the customer, having spent time upgrading their subscription, wouldn't want the work to be undone, for what could be a completely harmless reason (their credit card had expired for example).
It may be easier, from a development perspective, to mark a subscription as unpaid, than to roll back or to freeze (and then unfreeze) certain parts of the subscription. But you'll then run foul of barring the customer from a service that they have already paid for (their existing subscription) because they couldn't pay for the additional service.
You can use webhooks in Stripe. After creating an invoice, you can charge the invoice right away (invoice now). If the invoice payment fails, you can use a webhook to rollback to the old account.
Check this guide for more information about Stripe Subscriptions: https://www.truespotmedia.com/testing-webhooks-in-stripe-with-php/
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 :)