Shybes

[flat compass]

Hi 👋

So you are talking about a Subscription with a free trial and you want to apply taxes to the invoices after the trial ends?

[true garnet]

Correct. We are trying to set up a free trial that does not require the user to give us a billing method in order to start this free trial.

Our issue we are facing is that we legally need to tax our users for our subscription once they pay for it.

When a user is in a free trial, they have the ability to add a billing method on the Billing page in order to have their free trial automatically convert into a subscription.

Issue is, from what we understand, there is no method to require a Billing Address from the Stripe UI Billing page. (If this is not true, please let me know)

So, we need to be able to specifically handle the event where a user added a billing method during their free trial, but did not add a billing address. We believe this transaction should fail since we have taxing set to True.

To clarify - There is no way for us to require a user to add a billing address while adding a billing method from the Stripe Billing Page (We believe)

[flat compass]

You can collect it from them by activating the Billing Address collection

[true garnet]

But, we need to require a user to give us their billing address when adding their billing method. There does not seem to be an option to do this.

[ruby cosmos]

👋 hopping in here since snufkin has to head out soon

Correct - there's no way to REQUIRE a billing address be entered through the customer portal

[true garnet]

Hrm... Does that mean if we have automatic tax collection enabled, then a user adds ONLY a billing method and not an address, will that promotion to a subscription fail?

To outline the lifecycle :

7 Free Trial Created --> User adds payment method but not an address --> Free Trial Ends --> Try to charge user for subscription with billing method on hand

We've actually figured out this is causing problems around our codebase. We desperately need a method to handle automated tax collection when a user only inputs a Billing Method, but not a billing address.

[ruby cosmos]

From what I can tell - if the customer hasn't provided enough information for automatic tax to be calculated then you wouldn't even be able to create the trialing subscription w/ automatic tax enabled in the first palce

You'd have to require it at the start

[true garnet]

Correct

We just came to that conclusion ourselves

Which is a problem. There's no method for us to create a free trial without a payment method unless we require a billing address. But, there's no way for us to create a transaction that requires only a billing address

[ruby cosmos]

How are you currently creating subscriptions? Are you using Checkout or your own payment flow?

[true garnet]

Currently, we have two methods of getting revenue from our customers.

First, we have an annual subscription that goes through a Stripe Checkout Process, which requires a payment method & billing address.

Second, We have a "Gift Subscription". This Gift subscription allows someone to purchase a subscription then send a redeemable code to another user. Upon redeeming this code, the user gets a 1 year free trial (if they did not already have an active subscription, in which case we apply credits to their account)

We also have a free trial for the subscription, but, it currently requires a payment method in order to redeem. We are currently in the process of trying to transition this to a method without requiring card information, and this is when we discovered this issue.

[ruby cosmos]

Sorry I forgot to respond to this! Is your issue specifically with the first way or the second way of creating subscriptions?

At least for the first way, you should be able to create Checkout Session that don't require a PaymentMethod but still require billing address in the Checkout UI so you can guarantee they work with automatic tax

[true garnet]

Thanks for the heads up! It looks like our best plan of action right now is to create our own free trial system we handle in house.

It seems like the Stripe free trial functionality is just not robust enough to handle our exact use case.

[ruby cosmos]

You're welcome to do that, but again, if you're using Checkout you can definitely require that a billing address be set even with providing a Payment Method (which sounds like is exactly what you want)

[true garnet]

Yup, it would hypothetically work, but it actually opens us up to some more edge cases and we need a rapid turnaround time for this implementation.

[ruby cosmos]

Gotcha - yeah if you have a tight turnaround time definitely go with what you think will be the fastest