Non-recurring with expiry
Is there a workflow available that would support non-recurring subscriptions, but with an expiry date?
Use Case: Customer subscribes to a package which grants them access to a set of pages/tools for a pre-defined period of time (e.g. a week). This is offered as a 'paid trial', or more expensive than long-term subscriptions in order to encourage new users to trial a service.
As far as I can tell from the documentation, we can create a one-off charge with a 'none' billing date so they're not re-charged, but I can't see if there's a way to make this expire in a weeks time and cancel the users access/package?
Thanks,
Darryl
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Support Staff 1 Posted by Meghan Turner on 11 Jan, 2017 05:40 PM
Hi Darryl,
Welcome to CheddarGetter! I hope you're enjoying your set-up experience thus far.
To answer your question, yes, you can offer a paid trial period and cancel the customer when it ends, but you may want to consider other options depending what you'd like the majority of your customers to do after their paid trial is over.
Doing what you've suggested is possible. Although canceling customers after a certain amount of time isn't a pricing plan configuration option, you can use the one time invoice API call to charge the customer on sign-up and the subscription billable web hook that fires when a subscription becomes billable, but before it's actually transacted, to cancel a customer's account before they're charged for their first recurring invoice. In this case you'd want to set-up a pricing plan that has no automatic recursion, a $0.00 recurring charge, no set-up fee, and first bill date for the end of the trial period (if the trial period is 7 days, you'll want to configure your first invoice for 7 days after sign-up, so that the subscription billable hook fires at that time).
However, in order to reactivate a canceled account, a customer must give you their payment information again, so immediately canceling the customers account after the trial ends may not be the best option if you want your customers to convert to longer term subscriptions. If you could give me more detail about what you'd like your customers to do after their trial period ends (do you want them to convert to a longer term subscription immediately? do you think customers will want to continue to pay week by week? do you want them to cancel and then have them choose another pricing plan later? other scenarios that I'm not thinking of?), I may be able to suggest a few other solutions that will better fit your needs.
Thanks Darryl!
Meghan
Meghan Turner closed this discussion on 17 Mar, 2017 08:08 PM.