We have an existing saas app where we used to handle payments for subscriptions offline in a manual way. (They pay us directly to our accounts and we update their subscription data in our database manually).
Now we are moving over to stripe so that customers can automatically add/renew their subscriptions on our platform (via stripe).
Since our app queries stripe to fetch the customers current subscription, we will have to somehow move all old subscriptions to stripe but I am not sure how to proceed with that.
What I expect at the end:
- Add a subscription for all old customers to stripe WITHOUT charging the customers anything (as they have already paid to us outside of stripe).
- Then when the subscription ends, let stripe proceed with its flow of auto-charging the customer.
- I don't really care if the interval of the new subscription in stripe is from today to today 365days even though the customer purchased our services 3 months back (we don't mind giving him an extra 3 months for free)
What i tried and didn't work:
- Create a subscription manually for the customer (via the api/dashboard) but stripe throws an error saying no payment method set for the customer which leads me to believe that stripe will want to charge for this subscription.
Approaches that I am evaluating:
- Create a coupon with a 100% discount while creating a subscription for the old customers. But I am not really sure if this is the right way to approach this (what happens to stripe fees here?)
I would really appreciate it if someone can shed some light on what approach to take here?
Thanks!
CodePudding user response：
I believe you can create a Subscription with a trial period. Ie. If your customer purchased your services 3 months back, you can create a Subscription with trial period = 9 months, or even 1 year if you don't mind giving them 3 months free until today 365 days.
When a subscription is created with a trial period, it won't ask for a Payment Method. When its billing cycle is approaching, Stripe will send a trial_will_end webhook event for you to start collecting your customer payment method.
There is also a Stripe's official doc for trial Subscription.