neha____

[sly heath]

Hello 👋
Can you provide more context on what's causing the confusion?

Is it the timing of the email?

[valid briar]

example:

my customer lives in New York and signs up for the free trial on Dec 7, 8pm EST

she gets an email that says "Your free trial ends on December 15"

really, it's december 14 EST and december 15 UTC

so she thinks she won't be charged until december 15, but surprise, she's charged on the 14th

[sly heath]

My understanding was that the renewal date in the email uses customer's timezone and if the customer timezone isn't set then it uses your account's timezone & otherwise it defaults to UTC

Can you share the customer ID for the customer who saw this?

[valid briar]

that's true for renewal emails, but not for free trail emails

per customer support:

Hi Neha,

I hope you’re doing great and I apologise for the extended response time.

To give you more context, the subscription trial start and end date and time actually strictly follow UTC time in Stripe API. For instance, this invoice: in_1OF5BcBZ8IchjqOeSV3Cku7T and associated subscription: sub_1OCXqTBZ8IchjqOe9Pj9SMw4, I can see that the “start_date” was set on: “1700011485” which when converted to UTC is 2023-11-15 at 01:24:45. According to this data, the "trial_end" is also correctly set at “1700616285” which is 2023-11-22 at 1:24:45 UTC [0]. The attempt to charge the customer (cus_P0YyJFtLM3esda) was “created” at “1700616304” which is 2023-11-22 02:25:20 UTC, one hour after the trial ended [1].

I would also like to clarify a misunderstanding arising from the public doc [2]. It explains how renewal dates in emails use the customer's or the user’s timezone, or default to UTC. However, this applies only to “renewal reminders”, not to "Trial ending reminders" that you're dealing with, which follows the above-mentioned behaviour [3].

I understand that this can be difficult to understand but I can confirm that this is actually expected behaviour on our end. Let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Heather

[sly heath]

Ah interesting!!

[valid briar]

interesting in a bad way 😦

new customers are getting ticked off. this business charged me before my "free" trial ended!!

and i think i have to send the free trial email because of CC regulations

[sly heath]

The only alternative I can think of is to disable the free trial emails that Stripe sends, listening to webhook events to know when a subscription is approaching trial end & then sending the emails yourself.

Thinking about other alternatives...

[valid briar]

i guess i could do that

i just wish this timezone thing worked out of the box

btw, another bug is if the user uses a promo code like "$5 off first month"

the billing portal says "you will be charged [reducedAmount] every month"

so then i hear: the price changed after one month, bait and switch!!

i love stripe but it sucks when small things hurt my business like this

[sly heath]

Checking with a colleague about the timezone thing

Can you share more about the promo code thing? An example would help

[valid briar]

oh maybe i'm mistaken, looks different now

[sly heath]

Okay, talked to a colleague about the timezone issue. unfortunately, the workaround is what I suggested above where you send your own emails.

It seems like we've heard similar feedback about this in the past, there's a feature request for including timezones in the emails

I'd be happy to +1 that on your behalf, you could also write in via the support page
https://support.stripe.com/?contact=true

[valid briar]

okay thanks, i already made a support ticket, is there any way for me to give you the ID

Sent: 11/23/2023, 12:30 AM
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Incorrect date on Free Trial email

[sly heath]

Ah okay, all good. You can just respond to the ticket to flag that as a feature request instead

[valid briar]

ok thanks for your help