#Ben Clum-subscription
west raft
Hi 👋 I'm not certain off-hand whether this is possible, did you try and encounter an error?
elder olive
when we create the subscription with billing_cycle_anchor and proration_behavior=none, the subscription automatically becomes active. this is an issue because we still want to create that manual invoice on the user so we can charge a custom price for that first invoice. so if the customer abandons the checkout flow, they'll have an active subscription that they never signed up for.
west raft
Apologies for the delay, doing some testing.
Yeah, when setting billing_cycle_anchor to a future date, the returned Subscription is in an active state even if payment_behavior was set to default_incomplete.
elder olive
any ideas about another solution? the goal is to give a custom price for that first invoice. and still use the stripe-elements payment intent flow since that's what's recommended.
elder olive
so we're trying to stick with the payment intent flow as much as possible as that's what's recommended by Stripe. So when a user chooses an anchor date, we support three different "charging behaviors" for the first payment on the subscription.
- Do not charge (the first payment is $0)
- charge prorated amount (the default. this is what stripe does when you choose "create_proration" on the subscription)
- charge full amount (charge the entire amount of the payment plan. ignore any prorations).
so to support scenarios #1 and #3, we set the "proration_behavior" to "none" and create our own invoice manually with whatever amount that we want.
the issue is that we create the subscription with billing_cycle_anchor and proration_behavior=none, the subscription automatically becomes active, even if we create a manual invoice immediately after we create the subscription, even though the customer still hasn't checked out yet.
west raft
Hm, so could you flip your process a bit? Create a stand-alone one-off invoice for the initial payment, then when that is paid use a webhook event to trigger the creation of a Subscription.
elder olive
I think that might work, but the invoice wouldn't be tied to the subscription, which makes it difficult for reporting and keeping things clean.
and it looks like you can't tie an existing invoice to a subscription based on what I see here: https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/update
west raft
Yeah, that is true, you can't tie an invoice to a Subscription.
Do you already leverage Subscription trials?
If not, you might be able to use them to space back the start of the Subscription, and those Subscriptions will have a status of trialing so you could ignore granting access to your products/services if you see that status.