A subscription allows you to make recurring payments for a product. Subscriptions can be prepaid or postpaid. For creating a subscription a lot more information will be needed to configure the recurring and manage the billing cycle for a subscription. A subscription link is a shareable URL that will take your customers to a hosted payment page. A subscription link can be shared but needs to be paid before it expires (configured by the partner). The subscriptions once subscribed by the customer are reflected instantly in the panel and webhook/callbacks are also pushed to the configured URLs for all the activities done in the subscription. Since the payments are browser-based, the partner needs to set redirect URLs to where the customer will be redirected once the payment is done.

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Subscription Flow

Transact Bridge has a very dynamic system that allows different types of billing cycles depending on the demands. Subscriptions can be widely categorized into two types namely PREPAID and POSTPAID.

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Prepaid Billing Flow:

This type of billing is for those platforms which require the customer to pay the subscription amount in advance, and once the payment is received the services are available to the customer for consumption. This is generally used for those billing cycles that have fixed plans and are independent of resource-based billing. An example of this is Netflix, where the customer pays the subscription amount at the start of using the platform. On the renewal of the subscription, the auto-debit is also done before the access to the services. To use this type of billing flow, the Partner needs to pass billAtStart: true when creating the subscription.

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Postpaid Billing Flow:

This type of billing is for those platforms that require the customer to pay the subscription amount after the services have been used. This is generally used for those billing cycles that have metered billing and are independent of resources used during the billing cycle. An example of this is Amazon Web Services, where the customer pays the subscription amount at the end of the billing cycle of using the platform. To use this type of billing flow, the Partner needs to pass billAtStart: false when creating the subscription.

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Configuring Subscription Efficiently

There are various parameters to configure during the creation of a subscription like the payment flow, invoice flow, retry strategy, and various other things so that you can run it efficiently. It is very important to understand the meaning of each parameter and how to use it. Some of the important parameters and how they work in different subscription flows are mentioned below.
  • maxQuoteAmount: This parameter defines the maximum amount that we can auto-debit using the mandate that we have acquired from the customer.
  • dayUntillDue: For a billing cycle to work properly, the customer needs time to pay any dues that he/she might have. This parameter defines how many days are the customers allowed to pay before the invoice status changes from DUE to OVERDUE. Once this happens, the count of unpaidInvoices increases.
  • maxUnpaidInvoices: Once the count of unpaidInvoices is greater than the maxUnpaidInvoices , the subscription will change the status depending on the value of postMaxUnpaidInvoices.
  • billingDateAnchor: Some types of billing cycles need to be started from a specific date of a month. An example of this is Amazon Web Services, where the invoice will always be raised on the 1st day of the month, even if the customer started using the platform on the 15th of the month.
  • maxUnpausedInvoiceDueCount: This count helps to reactivate a subscription if the subscription was PAUSED due to OVERDUE invoices.
  • discount: Discount object allows to give discount on a subscription, based on the type that is for life time or for a limited period or for one time only.

Subscription API Docs

View the Postman API Collection