#peter_api
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tall citrus
Hi there
So you're trying to sort of restart the subscription in the same state it was paused in in terms of days into the billing cycle, etc
lone junco
Yeah!
FWIW, if the person "paused" longer than a cycle, like for 41 days on Jan 1 and billing_cycle_anchor = Jan 2, I’m assuming it’d be similar to stopping 10 days, like resumes_at = Feb 11 and next invoice on Feb 12
tall citrus
And the person has paid the previous invoice, is that right? Do you want to offer a "put my subscription on hold" functionality? Like if I am going on vacation for a 3 weeks tomorrow (I wish) and I've just paid my HBO streaming subscription or something like that, I would ideally like to pause it and then still have 29/30 days of service remaining and be invoiced again at that time?
tall citrus
I wonder if just using a trial period will be the easiest thing
lone junco
Can a trial period be added to an active subscription?
Oh I just tested from my REPL and am seeing something promising:
s4 = stripe.Subscription.modify(sub_id, expand=['items.data.price'], trial_end=s3.created + 86400 * 3)
print(_d(s3.billing_cycle_anchor))
# 2025-07-17 15:38:56 -04:00
print(_d(s4.billing_cycle_anchor))
# 2025-07-20 15:38:56 -04:00
Yep
By the way, are you aware of our "Test Clocks" feature? https://docs.stripe.com/billing/testing/test-clocks
I can't recommend it enough
Especially for this kind of thing
lone junco
yup, have been test clocking this particular sub
Are there any weird edge cases, like if the trial is too close to now? I am seeing “Can be at most two years from billing_cycle_anchor.”
tall citrus
nothing that is top of mind, but that's why I'd recommend using test clocks to work through a simulation and make sure you're getting the behavior you want
Also wanted to make sure to call out that if you use the "Resume Subscription" endpoint, you can reset the billing cycle anchor when you make that api call https://docs.stripe.com/api/subscriptions/resume?api-version=2025-06-30.basil#resume_subscription-billing_cycle_anchor
but then you have to keep the state of when you want that Subscription to resume
lone junco
ok, thx for the help. It seems like if I go the trialing route, then it’s pretty good at handling tracking time remaining on current cycle and I’ll just need to do some extra work to understand when a particular case of trialing is a "paused" state
hrm, resume seems like I’m still limited to "now" or "unchanged" for billing_cycle_anchor
tall citrus
yeah, that would be like if you tied that API call to a customer coming to your website and saying "I want to resume service" or scheduling that ahead of time
lone junco
got it, thx again!