#cab-subscription-cancellation
daring cloak
sinful quartz
For these payment methods that do not get retried, does that mean a subscription would just get cancelled immediately after a renewal payment fails?
No, subscription won't be cancelled automatically by default. It depends on your billing settings.
https://dashboard.stripe.com/settings/billing/automatic
It looks like I could change my Billing retry settings to mark a subscription as "unpaid" after all retries fail, but what does that mean? Does that mean I have to manually try to collect payment to re-activate the subscription, and also manage eventually cancelling it if payment cannot be collected?
Correct, you can either manually navigate your users to payment page and collect a different payment method OR send them a hosted invoice page etc
quick coral
Okay and it almost sounds like Stripe recommends setting the subscription to unpaid after failures based on this https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/overview#unpaid-subscriptions
I assume if I enable this setting, then I should manage a background job or something to eventually cancel the subscription if I know payment won't be collected?
minor wigeon
cab-subscription-cancellation
@quick coral to be clear we absolutely do not recommend this. It does work, and it's an option, but it's almost never what we advise businesses to use
quick coral
hmm okay. So what would you recommend doing for handling subscription payment failures on renewal when using a payment method like CashApp or US Bank Account, which will cancel the subscription right away when the payment fails (since Stripe doesn't retry on those payment methods)?
minor wigeon
Your plan is fine, I just wanted to make it clear that most businesses out there would ~never do that, and mostly just treat this as fully canceled at that point
quick coral
Okay, I'd like to stick to what Stripe generally recommends to avoid more and more hacky solutions down the line. So maybe its best to just have our own system do a better job of allowing subscriptions to be cancelled and not shutting off user's platform functionality?
This seems like an issue that many saas businesses would run into where they don't want to immediately disrupt user experiences upon a failed renewal payment. If most businesses do not use the "unpaid" flow, do you know of other ways to handle this case?
minor wigeon
Really your plan is fine, it's just not what most businesses do. Because most businesses don't want to keep access to the current period if it hasn't been paid for
if you do plan to let them retry again you definitely can take your approach it's fine
quick coral
okay thanks for the help!
minor wigeon
Sure! And we'll look into whethe we can improve the CashApp cancellation part, IMO it shouldn't cancel in this case
for bank debits there's a fee on failures which is why we cancel but we have a beta to let you do retries anyways
quick coral
Yeah I get the case for the Bank debits one, and saw stuff about the beta with retries. Would love to see updates for the cash app case!