A Note about Stripe

You might have noticed that when you sign up for a Stripe subscription, there’s no wording from Stripe that the subscription is going to end in 12 months.

That’s a limitation of the Stripe user interface: we can’t create a subscription product where we can set that any subscription that begins based on that product should automatically end at a certain time. We can change the frequency (every month, every 2nd month, every 3rd month, and so on) and the time (every week, every month, every year) and we can combine these together.

We can also create a free trial, but we can’t create a limited subscription from the user interface.

The usual way to do this automatically involves deploying a server that listens to webhooks from our Stripe account, and then applying a subscription schedule object to any new customer subscriptions that were created based on a product ID that we’re interested in, setting the end_behaviour to cancel, and an end date that’s 12 months later than the subscription’s start time (when you sign up).

Managing this automatically is complicated. A far easier method was chosen: every two weeks we’ll look at all the new subscriptions in the dashboard, and for the ones that are supposed to end in 12 months, we can manually set them to end in 12 months. Reasoning here is that at the beginning the number of these subscriptions are going to be low enough that this work is manageable manually. If at a point where there are more subscriptions that setting them one by one would take a long time, we will look into deploying the server and dealing with this using the API.

If you do have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!