amanda688

[sharp fulcrum]

Hi 👋 this is something that isn't necessarily modeled well in Stripe. Since our Subscription features revolve around the billing of Subscription payments, that's the cycle our objects focus on. We don't have prebuilt functionality for the concept of "an annual subscription with monthly billing", in Stripe that would a monthly Subscription with additional logic around it to control how long that Subscription runs for.

Subscription Schedules do sound like the best approach for this, where you create a Subscription Schedule that uses a monthly Price but sets iterations to 12 so it lasts 12 months.

Because this isn't a concept we have prebuilt features for, we don't have a good way to "renew" those either, my suggestion would be to never left the Subscription Schedule end and always use that to control what the Subscription will do next.

[delicate widget]

Hi Toby, thanks for your input. 😄

Since this is something that doesn't fit well -- would it make more sense to have a monthly subscription and just not let the user cancel it on their end? If they reach out to us and want to cancel, we'd have to check what their "annual" subscription date is and set the cancellation date to that.

[sharp fulcrum]

Yeah, I think that may be much easier. Subscription Schedules are a bit tricky to work with. You could even store the "annual date" as metadata on the Subscription so that value is available to you when you retrieve the Subscription object.

[delicate widget]

kk thanks

One last question related to that:
If I have some customers that I want to be able to manage their own subscriptions and some customers who have to contact us to update their subscription, is that something that I can set in the no-code Customer portal based on their product or price, or will I need to build a custom portal for that?

[sharp fulcrum]

I'm not exactly sure offhand, but I believe so. If I recall correctly, you have to set up a Product Catalog as part of the Customer Portal configuration, and I believe if you omit the Price/Product you're using for these annual-billed-monthly subscriptions from that catalog then Customers subscribed to them won't be able to modify their Subscriptions through the Customer Portal. But I would strongly recommend double checking that as I'm not positive about that.

[delicate widget]

kk will do! Thanks for your help!

[sharp fulcrum]

Any time!