brometheus_api | Stripe Developers | Page 1

spare driftBOT Mar 31, 2025, 4:42 PM

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scenic warren Mar 31, 2025, 4:44 PM

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Hi 👋

Have you tested this with the Subscriptions API

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Essentially, you are talking about proration, something the Stripe APIs handle for you.

glossy quarry Mar 31, 2025, 4:45 PM

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I explicitly want a $0 invoice at time of upgrade, not an invoice with negative total leading to Stripe Credit

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ah sorry one typo in my initial post:

Customer on a $20/year plan, they have ~~half~~ 3/4 of their time remaining ($15 value)

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And want them to be on 1.5 months of the new monthly plan before they receive their first regular monthly invoice ($10)

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sorry need to step away for a while but if you have an idea for how to solve please share!

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I'll check back in the next hour or two

scenic warren Mar 31, 2025, 4:47 PM

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But how would that work? Since the monthly plan has a monthly billing cycle? That would only happen if you explcitily set the billing cycle anchor to 15 days in the future when you make the update

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We require synchronous chats here, that is how we help developers

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This thread will be closed for inactivity but you are welcome to create a new thread

glossy quarry Mar 31, 2025, 4:48 PM

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Android plans support this (in fact it's their default) for upgrades, so just wondering how we could emulate that behavior

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you can check the linked documentation

scenic warren Mar 31, 2025, 4:49 PM

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Prorations and customer credits are how we would apply the same behavior. You could specify you want to invoice immediately when you make the update

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I recommend you

review the docs on upgrade/downgrade Subs and handle Prorations
Write a basic simulation of your scenario in Test mode and use Test Clocks to simulate the passage of time

This will allow you to rapidly try out different approaches and validate the behaviors of different configurations so you can be certain you get the behavior you are looking for.

glossy quarry Mar 31, 2025, 4:53 PM

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Is there a way to set a one-off billing cycle with arbitrary start and end dates, so not monthly?

scenic warren Mar 31, 2025, 4:56 PM

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I'm not sure I follow. You can perform an update to the Subscription that resets the billing_cycle_anchor to the current timestamp ("now"). https://docs.stripe.com/api/subscriptions/update#update_subscription-billing_cycle_anchor

So if you made the update halfway through a billing period, the result would be a one-off billing cycle that was not either the full year (first price) or month (second price).

glossy quarry Mar 31, 2025, 5:03 PM

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I want to produce a one-off 1.5-month-long billing cycle starting now, for a monthly subscription

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but would also love this billing cycle to act normally w.r.t. future prorations we might do on that billing cycle. So if we canacelled with prorations halfway through that, it would properly refund 0.75 months worth of $10 subscription ($7.50)

scenic warren Mar 31, 2025, 5:06 PM

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I think the best approach here would be to test out a few different implementations. I don't think we support a one-off 1.5 month billing cycle but you could have the first month charge $0 due to the proration and the second month charge half the expected amount due to the Customer Credit

glossy quarry Mar 31, 2025, 5:10 PM

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I guess the short version is we might be able to hack something that works similarly through one of:

trials
new subscription with delayed billing cycle anchor
subscription schedules
messing with the subscription price (potentially setting it to $0 temporarily)
pausing the subscription?

But this isn't something that's easily natively supported by Stripe?

scenic warren Mar 31, 2025, 5:12 PM

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I think Subscription Schedules is actually likely to be your best bet. It offers the greatest flexibilty here but that comes at a cost of increased complexity. We don't natively support a one-off billing cycle approach using the Subscription & Price objects.

spare driftBOT Mar 31, 2025, 5:16 PM

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glossy quarry Mar 31, 2025, 5:22 PM

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Is there a way to "pause" all invoices for that 1.5 month duration, then we reactivate as normal at the end using subscription schedules?

atomic current Mar 31, 2025, 5:37 PM

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Hi, taking over as my teammate needs to step away. Let me catch up.

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If you're looking to offer services for free temporarily, you can pause the payment collection on a subscription: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/subscriptions/pause-payment

Since you have a bit of a unique set up, you'd want to test the flow in test mode using Test Clocks: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/testing/test-clocks

This feature enables you to advance time in test mode so you do not have wait to test subscriptions

glossy quarry Mar 31, 2025, 5:40 PM

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yeah, familiar with test clocks, such an awesome feature

atomic current Mar 31, 2025, 5:41 PM

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Agree!

#brometheus_api