Laksh

[red ivy]

Hi there 👋 I'm not familiar with that change offhand and will need to take some time to look into that.

I do see that change mentioned here, but I'm not familiar with what the previous state was:
https://stripe.com/docs/upgrades#2019-10-17

Do you have an example of what was provided in the start field?

Grabbed a Subscription from my test account, and retrieved it in an older API version as well as a newer one, they appearaed to be the same there so I don't think the Subscription I grabbed is a good example of what you're referring to.

[timid heart]

yes, let me try finding a subscription which has different values across the api version

[timid heart]

Hey @red ivy, so here are two api responses from the different api versions for the same subscription. As you can see the start and start_date values are different. (I am able to replicate this by modifying an existing subscription by adding a product to it)

[red ivy]

Thank you! Taking a look.

Oh I see, so it looks like in that case start is similar to something like an updated value, where it shows the time the Subscription was last edited. 🤔 Doing a little bit of testing to see if this is only for updates made directly by the API, or if that start field also changes when a Subscription moves from one period to the next.

[timid heart]

sure thing, thanks again for helping on this. As per the stripe docs it says that the start value in the older api_version represented the time when the current plan configuration started, so I would guess any action that changes the subscription.items should cause the start value to change

[red ivy]

Yup, that seems to be what I'm seeing in my testing. A Subscription simply moving to another billing period does not seem to cause a difference between start and start_date.

Hm, I don't think there is a good way to retrieve that value directly from the API anymore. I think if that value is still important to your flows that you will need to:

• Listen to Events with a Webhook Endpoint, specifically customer.subscription.updated
• Check request.id to see if the update came from a Request (field will be null if the change was triggered by one of our autoamtic processes): https://stripe.com/docs/api/events/object#event_object-request-id
• Store the timestamp provided in created on the Event as an estimate of when the change was made in a DB on your end that you can reference in the future.