#nukesforbreakfast_docs
urban pendantBOT
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modern river
Hi 👋
Unfortunately, we only allow Subscription cancellation immediately or in the future. Backdating the cancellation is not currently supported.
I can file this as a feature request if you can provide some concrete details of how you would use this feature.
If you need this functionality immediately, you can implement this yourself through a combination of cancelling a Subscription immediately, calculating the proration manually, and issuing a partial refund using the last Invoice's payment intent as the payment to refund against.
tidal terrace
Sure. So in this case we were supposed to cancel the original subscription back in January since the user was in the grace period, but our code logic was wrong at the time and scheduled the cancellation for end of term instead of when it should have. We're trying to correct the issue now. In general though, there can be cases where the existing plan can be swapped out within the grace period, so we would have to backdate the cancellation regardless.
I can manually fix it, but I wanted to use a stripe method to automatically calculate the prorated refund if one existed.
modern river
In general though, there can be cases where the existing plan can be swapped out within the grace period, so we would have to backdate the cancellation regardless.
Can you explain why swapping out a plan results in cancelling a Suscription?
tidal terrace
Sure, so we have a different service provider that bills outside of stripe we are switching to, so we have to cancel the subscription when a user switches plans. We aren't allowing any new sign ups with the old provider anymore.
But in this case, they switched within the rollover grace period for the new provider, so while the switch was done on 2026-01-16, it was actually effective 2026-01-06, so we would have had to backdate the subscription cancellation regardless.
I think there's a more general argument to be made that being able to backdate a cancellation on a subscription would be a useful feature. Not everything is done right every time, and in some use cases there are grace periods where people are allowed to cancel effective back to some previous date.
modern river
Okay so part of the reason for backdated cancellation has to do with your business model and how you want to offer grace periods to your customers? I think that's a valid case I can make for why this feature would be helpful
tidal terrace
yes, that's the crux of it. There are also cases where a subscription might not get cancelled as expected due to an error. It would be useful to be able to cancel them effective when they were originally supposed to be cancelled, and have stripe automatically calculate the refund due.
modern river
For Subscription prorations, we generally create customer credits instead of issuing refunds. In this case, would that be acceptible or would you ideally want the customer actually refunded?
tidal terrace
Well, since the subscription is being cancelled and they might not necessarily sign up for another, it seems like having the flexibility to do credit notes or refunds depending on the situation would be best.
urban pendantBOT
modern river
Okay, I have filed that feedback with the details on the use case you provided. I cannot make any guarantees on if/when it will be implemented but at least we have recorded the interest in the feature.
tidal terrace
no problem, thank you!