Subscriptions and renewals

Recurring products charge your buyers on a schedule and keep their access running for as long as the subscription is active.

Setting up

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

• Billing interval: monthly or yearly.
• Free trial days: from 0 to 90. Buyers are charged when the trial ends.
• Trial fee: optional. It’s charged upfront at the start of the trial, and the full price starts once the trial ends.

Recurring payments need a provider that supports repeat charges, so connect payments first. Both Stripe and PayPal handle subscriptions. See How to accept payments.

The subscribers screen

Open Sales → Subscribers. At the top you’ll see your monthly recurring revenue (MRR), with yearly plans normalised to a month, and the number of active, past due and cancelled subscriptions.

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 running subscription, “Trial ends” during a trial and “Cancelled” once it’s over.

The statuses are Active, Trialling, Past due, Cancelled and Incomplete.

How renewals work

Every successful renewal charge is recorded as a separate order in your records, so it shows up in your orders and in your revenue figures. If a subscription had fallen past due, a successful renewal brings it back up to date automatically.

If you’ve turned on renewal reminders, the customer gets a heads-up message 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 incident rather than on every retry. Retries then run automatically, and by default the member keeps access during the retry window, because most failures come down to an expired card that gets sorted out.

You can change this in Settings, in the customer payments section, where you decide whether the first failed payment removes access straight away.

Cancelling

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

The same settings page decides whether members can cancel on their own, whether cancelling takes two steps and which reasons they can choose from.

Churn, MRR and retention

You’ll find these metrics in the ready-made reports. See the report catalogue.