Pausing Subscriptions
Written By Stefan S.
Last updated About 2 months ago
There are various reasons why vendors and customers may want to pause a recurring subscription rather than fully cancel it.
Below are instructions to allow vendors to manually pause subscriptions, as well as to enable self-serve options in the billing portal to pause billing.
Paused Subscriptions will show in your Subscriptions dashboard with a filter status of Paused.
Please Note:
Once a subscription is un-paused, it will continue charging the normal set price and charge frequency.
Result #1: If the next billing date for the subscription has not passed, the customer will be charged once the next billing date happens. This is called Inside Next Billing Period Resume (See below)
Result #2: If the next billing date for the subscription has already passed, the customer will be charged immediately after unpausing. This is called Outside Next Billing Period Resume (See below)
Inside Next Billing Period Resume:
If a subscription is paused and resumed within the current billing cycle of the subscription, the customer will be charged on their upcoming billing date after unpausing.
Example: The subscription rebills on the 1st of every month, and the subscription is paused on the 15th and resumed on the 25th; this is considered as an inside next billing period resume. The customer will be charged on their normal billing date.
Outside Next Billing Period Resume:
When a paused subscription resumes after the set “next billing date”, it is considered as outside the next billing period. In this case, the customer will be charged as soon as they unpause. After the charge, the customer’s next billing date will be reset in line with their normal billing frequency.
Example:
The Subscription rebills on the 1st of every month. If the subscription is paused on the 15th and resumed on the 28th of the next month, this is considered outside the next billing period resume, and the customer is charged immediately after unpausing, then the next billing date will be set.
Subscription Paused and Un-paused events will also be available with our IPN.
There are currently no API calls for pausing and unpausing subscriptions. If your development team needs API calls for pausing/unpausing, please submit a feature request here.
Email notifications for the Subscription Un-paused and the reminder Subscription Unpausing Soon events are now editable and can be enabled or disabled for sending out to customers in your Campaign settings. To find out more about editing transactional emails, click here.
Please Note:
If the customer is already past their reactivation/unpause date – then the system would attempt to bill them when the subscription is unpaused.
If you are looking into preventing the charge from occurring, you can cancel the subscription fully in Payments -> Subscriptions.
To avoid sending out notifications to the customer or triggering integration events, select the Do Not Fire Cancellation Events option.
To set a new next charge date, reactivate the subscription to set a new date when the customer’s charge should occur.