#pickwatch-oliver_subscription-trials-billing-period
late pebbleBOT
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barren bluffBOT
molten quartz
Hi there 👋 I'd like a bit more context about the flow you're interested in building.
When you say you want to give a free-trial when your customers already have a Subscription, is that adding a free-trial to the existing Subscription, or are you talking about starting a second Subscription for them that begins with a free trial?
inner bluff
Exactly, we would be adding a free trial into the existing subscription.
molten quartz
Are you using metered billing?
I'm asking because you mentioned an Invoice is generated when the Subscription is moved into a trial period, and that you would have to void that Invoice. That's a little surprising to me as free-trial periods result in $0 Invoices being generated, which automatically succeed and are marked as paid since there is no payment to be processed for them.
There are a couple ways on how to approach this, and ultimately it depends on what behavior you want to see here that will dictate which flow is the best match for you.
inner bluff
No metered billing, to be honest this phenomenon of voiding the generated invoice comes from other team members' memory. It may be something legacy or it may be that we mis-remembered, because we couldn't reproduce it when we were testing earlier.
Just to illustrate the flow we'd like to create:
- Customer already has a paying subscription.
- We want to offer them a free trial period within their existing subscription for X period of time.
- Once that trial period is concluded, billing resumes.
So if the customer was halfway through a monthly billing cycle, once the trial ends they resume the remainder of their monthly billing cycle (which they already paid for) before then continuing to pay.
molten quartz
So if the customer was halfway through a monthly billing cycle, once the trial ends they resume the remainder of their monthly billing cycle (which they already paid for) before then continuing to pay.
This last part isn't supported by free trials directly. When the free trial period ends the Subscription moves into a brand new billing period, and the customer is charged for that billing period.
You'd either need to extend the free trial period to end on when the billing should resume, or consider using a different approach like pausing the subscription:
https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/pause-payment#collect-payment-never
late pebbleBOT
inner bluff
Right okay that makes sense! Is there also a way to configure this in the Dashboard or is the API method the only way we can make this happen?
molten quartz
I'm less familiar with the dashboard side of these flows, my teamamtes and I in this forum focus on helping developers work with our API primarily, so I'm not sure. I'd suggest creating a testmode Subscription and seeing if there is an option to pause it in one of the action menus when you view it in your Stripe dashboard.
inner bluff
Brilliant okay, thank you! But if we didn't mind creating a new billing cycle, would you say adding new phases to the subscription would be the correct way to do it? Or making a free trial as we did previously?
molten quartz
Phases are an attribute of Subscription Schedule objects, not Subscriptions.
Subscription Schedules are used to schedule changes that you want to automatically be applied to a Subscription in the future. I'd suggest using them if you want to schedule when the Subscription will move into a free trial period. If you want to make that transition immediately, then I'd recommend continuing to set the end date for the trial period directly on the Subscription.
inner bluff
Brilliant okay, thanks so much for your help!
Have a great day/afternoon/evening ahead
molten quartz
Thank you! Hope you do the same