#callum0296
alpine harbor
arctic sundial
👋 If I'm understanding this correctly, you've created two subscriptions, one per device
Have you looked into using Subscription Schedules for this?
You'd have to keep track of trial dates on your end but you could create a Schedule with a future phase for when a subscription item should be added (where that item corresponds to when the customer should be charged for the first time for the second product)
alpine harbor
so you'd have the one subscription, and then as the trial date ends we increase the subscription quantity?
arctic sundial
yep, something like this: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/subscription-schedules/use-cases#increasing-quantity
I recommend playing around with Schedules to get familiar with the flow.
alpine harbor
interesting, this looks promising as well. when you say keep track of trial dates on our end, what do you mean specifically? at first glance, the flow could be.
customer signs up with their first product & subscription. that would just have the free year for that single product (as i can't see a way to create an empty subscription).
then two weeks later, they add another product & subscription. i'd update the schedule so 1 year from now, it updates the quantity
arctic sundial
That's exactly it. You wouldn't be able to use phases.trial for the period between the time when they add another product and when you want to start charging them for the other product. you'd just update the quantity/items on the schedule accordingly
alpine harbor
nice, yeah okay. the only downside i can see to that is the customer won't be able to see the phases from the stripe dashboard? so they'd only see the 1 subscription, with the 1 product. even if they bought 3 more products during that free year, they wouldn't see them until the schedules run.
it's probably not too big of a deal, as we might be able to just do our own "dashboard"
reef flareBOT
alpine harbor
just to confirm, if we had the seperate subscriptions, there's no way to aggregate the charges to a single charge/invoice?
arctic sundial
That's correct, they'd be separate invoices if they were two separate subscriptions
alpine harbor
yeah gotcha. which i don't think the client will go for. so looks like it might be the scheduling flow then
hmm. this might complicate it more. but they also want the ability to choose between monthly & yearly subscriptions. let's say the sign-up for monthly, but then want to switch to yearly. would i have to remove the monthly product, and the yearly product and update the schedules if there were any?
dapper marsh
Hello! I'm taking over and catching up...
A single Subscription can only have one billing cycle (monthly or yearly). You can do the yearly stuff as 12 months as a workaround to get them all into a single Subscription, but you'll get an Invoice every month that way.
alpine harbor
yeah okay. if i wanted to go down the seperate subscription route, i assume i could manually create an invoice and a single charge?
i.e. for the first of each month, generate a single invoice and create a single payment due?
dapper marsh
Yep.
alpine harbor
by the looks of it we'll have to do that manually via a cron job or similiar
hmm okay, tricky tricky. thank you for your help so far, will keep investigating and have a chat to the client
dapper marsh
I don't think you'd have to do a cron job. You can create a Subscription Schedule that creates a Subscription in the future, for example.
alpine harbor
a subscription schedule to generate a manual invoice and single charge though? (if i had say 3 subscriptions for the products)
dapper marsh
Yeah, you could create a Subscription Schedule that creates a Subscription in the future, which would create an initial Invoice at that time, then after the first period it would cancel, so only one Invoice/Charge would ever happen for it.
alpine harbor
hmm interesting. from what i can see though, i won't be able to know how many subscriptions live on the account? as i'll need to set the quantity to whatever the current active subscriptions are
dapper marsh
Not sure I understand, can you provide more detail?
You can list Subscriptions by customer to see how many they have: https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions/list
I'm not sure how the quantity would factor in if you're doing on Subscription for each device?
alpine harbor
so say i have 3 active subscriptions on the account. i create a subscription schedule to create a single subscription that has a quantity of 3, so i can generate a single invoice & a single charge.
ah yeah, sorry, so i'd pass in the current number of active subscriptions for the quantity.
will i have to create a schedule each month?
dapper marsh
Wait, why would the quanity be based on the number of existing Subscriptions?
Would the new Subscription the new Subscription Schedule creates replace the existing Subscriptions?
Backing up a bit, if one of your hard requirements is a single charge per month you need to stick to a single Subscription, period.
If you have multiple Subscriptions you're going to have multiple Charges.
Is that a hard requirement?
alpine harbor
Yeah, you could create a Subscription Schedule that creates a Subscription in the future, which would create an initial Invoice at that time, then after the first period it would cancel, so only one Invoice/Charge would ever happen for it.
sorry, i think i misintepreted this. i read this as if you have 3 seperate subscriptions, you can create a schedule to kind of "combine" the 3. so at the start of each month, you create a subscription via a schedule, it would have a quantity of 3, and that subscription is what would charge the card, and then it would get cancelled.
it's not a hard requirement as of yet, i still need to take it to the client. i just have a very strong feeling they're going to want all charge on a single payment/invoice
but at this point it looks like i'll have to have the single subscription, and schedule the addition of products when they add more
dapper marsh
No, you can't combine multiple different Subscriptions into one using a Subscription Schedule.
Really your original approach sounds like the best option.
alpine harbor
yeah it wouldn't be combining, i guess you'd be creating a temporay "4th" subscription. this would charge the card. kind of hard to explain
yep, original being the single subscription and then schedule the addition of controllers?
unless they swing for multiple charges, then we're groovy either way 🤷♂️
dapper marsh
Yep.
alpine harbor
thanks heaps for your help team, massively appreacited
dapper marsh
No problem, good luck with it!