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Changing Between Account Levels and Pro-rating

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chris

23 Mar, 2012 07:08 PM

The situation I have is: multiple levels of access to the same product. We would like to avoid refunds so the plan was for cancellations and dropping to a free plan to give them access to the end of their paid period. The way this was set was for all accounts but free to pro-rate, and for free to simply start at the end of their current billing period.

However, this leads to a situation where double charging is possible. Switching from Paid -> Free -> Paid gives 2 charges of the paid subscription, no matter the date.

Is it possible to change the next billing period depending on what plan they are switching from/to? The paid plan is active for a month still when they switch to free, because free doesn't change the billing period. But then in order to bill immediately when switching to a paid level they need to be set to prorate.

Would the best way be to set the free plan to pro-rate, to decay the credit given over time, and to track the active plan in our logic?

Related: We're using hosted pages to avoid extra PCI requirements of taking the billing details ourselves. Is managing the accounts like this through the API but using the hosted pages for taking account details an acceptable workflow?

1. 1 Posted by chris on 23 Mar, 2012 07:39 PM

   

   After some additional discussion our current approach is going to have the possible double charges, but to display a warning to the user if the double-charge situation is detected, and if possible issue a credit to their account for the un-used time if they go ahead. (crediting before the transaction rather than with the transaction leads to possible issues if they do not complete the transaction but have the credit left against them, however)

   It would still be good to know if there is a better sanctioned way to handle this.

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2. Marc Guyer closed this discussion on 28 Mar, 2012 02:30 PM.