Renewal Settings with Subscriptions, Explained: Trials, Overbooking, Max Renewals and More

The Auto-renewal settings section of a subscription creation page contains 7 sub-sections. Below we'll briefly cover what each one means.

When creating a subscription, you'll find a toggle to make it an auto-renewing subscription: one that automatically charges the price you've set on the same day every billing cycle that the customer initially purchased the subscription.

So, for example, if you chose a Duration Setting of 'Absolute Interval: one month' and a customer then bought the subscription on the 13th, they'd be automatically charged that same price every month on the 13th going forward).

The goal of the free trial feature is to allow customers to try the benefits and decide if they want to go ahead with paying for the renewing subscription or cancel before it begins charging them.

With a free trial, the customer will have free access for a default of 1 week. You can update this time period to be longer or shorter, and you can even update the price of this "free" trial to be a reduced price of the subscription.

The maximum number of renewals is a cap on those billing cycles mentioned above. If you set this at, say, 10 months, the customer will see 10 renewal charges, and then the subscription will cease to renew and the benefits will cease to be usable.

If you prefer that everyone on this subscription is charged on the 15th or some other day, toggle this feature on and pick your favorite date.

This one is similar to the free trial. It differs in that it allows you to use the renewal cycles instead. In other words, you can have a $100/month subscription that begins the first 2 months at 60/month to make it more enticing for customers.

This feature works well with 'limited use' subscriptions: those that give a limited number of credits per billing cycle, like 10 class credits a month.

Inevitably, you'll have a customer (or two) that tend to burn through those 10 credits before the month is over, and can then no longer book classes.

Enter 'Allow over-booking', which allows those customers that have run out of credits to register for classes and "put it on their [subscription] tab" until the next billing cycle re-adds those next 10 credits. Their subscription charge at the end of the month will then be the normal monthly charge plus the drop-in prices of any additional classes they registered for after running out of credits.

When a customer's subscription is frozen, and then subsequently unfrozen, the default setting is to move the new renewal date to the day it unfroze. Unless you toggle on 'preserve payment schedule after unfreeze.' This keeps the original renewal schedule after the subscription is unfrozen.