Subscriptions and renewals

Recurring products bill your buyers on a schedule and keep their access alive while the subscription is running.

Setting one up

Open a product, go to the Pricing tab and choose Subscription instead of One-time purchase. Then set:

• Billing interval, monthly or yearly.
• Free trial days, 0 to 90. Buyers are charged when the trial ends.
• Trial fee, optional. Charged upfront when the trial starts, with the full price beginning after it.

Subscriptions are charged through Stripe. PayPal supports one-time purchases only, so connect Stripe first. See Connecting a payment provider.

The Subscribers screen

Open Sales, then Subscribers. Along the top you get Monthly recurring revenue with yearly plans normalised to a month, plus counts of Active, Past due and Canceled.

Search by name or email, or filter by status. Each row shows the Subscriber, the Amount, the Status, and a date column that adapts: Renews for a live subscription, Trial ends while trialing, Canceled once it has ended.

Statuses are Active, Trialing, Past due, Canceled and Incomplete.

How renewals work

Each successful renewal charge is recorded as its own order in your ledger, so it appears in Orders and in your revenue figures. If the subscription had slipped into past due, a successful renewal moves it back to current automatically.

If you have renewal reminders switched on, the customer gets a heads-up email before each charge, once per billing period.

When a payment fails

The subscription moves to Past due and you get an email about it, once per lapse rather than on every retry. Retries then run automatically, and by default the member keeps their access during the retry window because most failures are an expired card that resolves itself.

You can change that under Settings, then Customer payments, where you decide whether a first failed payment revokes access straight away.

Cancelling

Cancel from the subscriber row. The cancellation is scheduled for the end of the current period, so the member keeps access until the period closes, and the row shows Cancels at period end. Access is revoked once the provider confirms the subscription has ended.

The same settings page controls whether members can cancel themselves, whether cancelling takes two steps, and what reasons they can pick from.

For churn, MRR and retention figures see The report catalogue.