--- title: Lumpy payments with Subscription Schedules slug: lumpy-payments-with-subscription-schedules published_at: 2020-04-17 16:00:09 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:13 +0000 summary: description: In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through how to use Subscription Schedules to make the payments for a Subscription \"lumpy\" meaning take a lower amount for a period, then revert back to the original amount. ## Resources - Official Guide https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/subscription-schedules ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate @ Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments tags: [stripe, payments, subscription schedules, billing, lumpy, covid-19, @cjav_dev] views: 3269 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/lumpy-payments-with-subscription-schedules youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gws-r392I8 youtube_id: 2gws-r392I8 embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/2gws-r392I8 thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2gws-r392I8/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Lumpy payments with Subscription Schedules *Published: April 17, 2020* *Views: 3269* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gws-r392I8) [![Lumpy payments with Subscription Schedules](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/2gws-r392I8/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gws-r392I8) ## Description In this edition of Stripe Developer Office Hours, follow along as CJ Avilla walks through how to use Subscription Schedules to make the payments for a Subscription "lumpy" meaning take a lower amount for a period, then revert back to the original amount. ## Resources - Official Guide https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/subscription-schedules ## Presenter CJ Avilla, Developer Advocate @ Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat. ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88. #Stripe #Payments ## Transcript [Music] as businesses respond to global economic shifts here at stripe our priority is to help you serve your customers and keep your payments infrastructure operating reliably and so we're working quickly to add features that will help you take action for instance just this week we released the ability to automatically cancel a subscription where a payment was disputed as a subscription based business you may want to offer your services for free temporarily or otherwise pause a subscription and so we recently published an episode about pausing subscriptions that might be useful if those fit one of your use cases alternatively rather than fully pausing the subscription you may want to offer some sort of partial relief to customers by collecting payments in a more lumpy way meaning collecting a possibly lower amount for a period and then a higher amount for a period and finally shifting back to your typical predictable recurring payment amounts so in today's demo we'll use one of the advanced features of stripe called subscription schedules to show you how to schedule changes to a subscription overtime welcome back to stripe developer office hours I'm CJ a developer support engineer here at stripe and yeah so I wanted to show you real quick what we're gonna build so here we have a view we're just gonna have like a list of subscriptions we'll have a view with a list of subscriptions and we'll see their current plan and then when we open up one of those subscriptions we have this form where we can edit the subscription the idea is that you would have some inner admin interface potentially where you would allow your support folks or you know kind of like your back-end Operations team to modify subscriptions by giving users a temporary break on their subscription payments so we have this list of temporary plans we might apply to the subscription and then we can choose some duration in months maybe we want to give this make this budget plan which is half the price or some amount lower than your standard plan we want to apply this plan for five months and then shift back to the typical payment schedule so we can click update and that's really the entire demo we want to show here at the bottom we have you know the output from the schedule that was created and we can see that it has three phases and we'll talk about the phases and how subscription schedules work but so this is really like the the meat and potatoes of what we're going to build today really simple UI but the scheduling and managing of the phases is a little bit more in-depth and so I wanted to dig into that and show you how we might implement this all right let's take a look at some code I'm gonna jump back over here kill my server and then we're just going to completely remove all of the code and then start from a stripe sample so if you haven't already checked out the flask starter we're going to be using Python and flask today you can head over to the foundation's playlist on YouTube and see how we go from zero to this flask starter but today we're jumping right to the to a point where the boilerplate is already built for us by using the stripe CLI stripe samples create developer office hours so if you're following along at home you can run this in your terminal and then we want to use Python today so we can we have that installed and right off the bat we can jump into developer office hours into the server and then I want to reactivate my Python environment so I'm gonna say Python 3 dash M then then then bin activate to activate my environment okay and then I can say something like flask app is the server dot PI flask run and then we have the port for two for two I'm gonna fire up that server and then we'll reload our page here and we'll see that the URL is not found and at the root we just have this header tag so we're gonna the first thing we want to do is add the list of subscriptions with the links so that when we click the link we can view the subscription details so let's quickly build that out okay so on the client in our index.html we want to have a list of subscription and we're gonna use the templating language for flask here for sub in subscriptions and we're just gonna fetch these subscriptions directly from stripe and the API call but you might also just have these in your database and in practice you should store the IDS of the subscriptions that you're working with in your own database so if if the subscription doesn't have a schedule then we want to show it because we're if once we've scheduled it we don't really want it in this list anymore just so that for the demo if a subscriptions schedule property is populated that means it's being managed by a schedule so if it's not part of a schedule then we want to show some link so let's see we want to make a a ul here and for each of these we want an Li we're inside of the Li we have an innate AG that's gonna go to slash subscriptions oops slash and then the ID of the subscription and then we'll print out the subscription ID like the content of the link will be the subscription ID and its current plan so we can do that like this and then the plan is going to be inside of items yes so let's see data is here oh and it'll be the plan ID okay I believe this is how we want to set this up we might need to come back and tweak it a little bit but the we're sort of assuming that our subscriptions are very simple and they each only have one plan if your subscriptions if you're supporting multiple plans on per subscription then you would want to maybe modify this to show the list of plans and then when we revert back to the previous subscription state we want to make sure that we're updating to all those previous plans so we're kind of assuming the most common case the 99 or the the 90% case where the subscription has just one plan so we've got a link here that has a subscription ID and then the the plan and okay so let's update our server-side code so that we're using the stripe API to fetch the list of subscriptions and then passing them to our view so on the server side in our index action we want to say subscriptions our striped out subscription that list and maybe we want to limit this to 50 and we'll pull off dot data we're gonna pass this into the view like this okay so let's restart our server and then refresh the page here and see if we get our list of subscriptions and we do so those are looking great this is the list of subscriptions that are in our account that do not have a schedule they're not being managed by a schedule okay so then when we click on a subscription we want to be brought to a view where we can manage the subscription directly so let's add a new view here or a new route this is going to be a get route to subscriptions ID we'll call it like get subscription and we're going to be getting these subscriptions by ID and then we want to retrieve the subscription from the stripe API and then render a view where we pass in that subscription okay so let's go define that view subscription HTML and it's going to be a page just like this we'll use that same CSS and we will use the same sort of scaffolding here and then in the header we'll just make this the idea of the subscription and then we want to add some form controls here okay so the form lets let's just make sure that this is loading as expected now so we'll restart the server go back to the client refresh the page internal server error okay let's see what we've got sub is undefined okay so I tried to access sub here but we're passing in subscription okay restart the server back to the client refresh the page alright so now we've got our ID of our subscription so we want to add those form elements so we're gonna have one form element that allows us to select which temporary plan we want to apply and then we want to add an input box a number input for the the number of cycles that we want to apply this temporary plan for and then a button so that we can collect all the data and send it to our server to make the actual change so let's go back to the client here and add some fields the first one is going to be the temp plan and let's make this a select box and it's going to be called the ID will be plan and then we need to go define a plan I want to show you how to define a plan as part of our existing product or define it as a new product and then we'll we'll add that as an option here so we'll come back to this and then let's add another field for the the number of cycles or iterations and commonly this will be in months it's gonna be a number input field we'll just call this iterations and the value will start off with three maybe we want to give folks a three month break in the beginning now as you may imagine we could add multiple fields here so that we can have a lower plan and then a higher plan and then go back to our normal plans today I'm just going to show you how you might give a three month temporary like lower plan that you can apply and one of the reasons that you might use this pattern instead of applying a coupon as if your subscriptions are already using coupons then it's tough because your subscription can only have one coupon so it's kind of hard to manage like swapping that coupon out for maybe a kovat coupon and then swapping back so by using a subscription schedule we can sort of just change to a different plan and then schedule out when that plan is going to be reverted back so here we might also add like step is one so that we can only modify the number one at a time okay we'll have a button called update and then here at the bottom we'll write some JavaScript to send this data back to our server so I've got a script tag we want to grab reference to a couple things first a plan then we'll grab reference to the iterations and finally the button and then we want to say that when the button is clicked we're going to make a post request back to our server with the data that we collected here so I'm going to use this post request and then in this case I'm gonna send a put yeah because we're updating the subscription let's use a put request and we'll send the put two subscriptions / ID again so we can use the same stripe ID for the subscription for our routing on our back-end / and then here we can say subscription ID so that'll be the route we'll make this a put because it's an update and then we will make the data that we're passing we will send the iterations as the integer value for the iterations that value I'm not a hundred percent sure we need to parse in to parse this into an integer but just to be safe okay and then for the plan we want to pass plan value all right and then unsuccessful just kind of console.log the scheduled data that we returned or that we receive back so this is I believe this should work let's go into the stripe dashboard to create a plan for our temporary plan values here so if we go to the stripe dashboard under products this demo product is for some CRM software currently the CRM software supports two plans standard in startup so we're gonna add a new pricing plan called standard budget and we're gonna leave the ID blank so that stripe can generate an ID for us there's a couple of benefits to this related to where the data is stored in how quickly we can access it so it's nice to just leave the ID blank it's going to be a recurring plan our standard plan is Jett is generally $99 per month so or 9999 so let's make this plan let's make it $79.99 and we'll call this our discount so we'll come down from a hundred down to 79 or 80 okay so we're gonna add the pricing plan and so now we have a standard budget plan so this is going to be the plan ID that we want to switch to temporarily so I'm going to click to copy that and then go back into my UI here and say this is our standard budget plan so this is the ID of the plan that we want to pass to our back-end and we're gonna like temporarily switch to so we've got we've got our button wired up we've got some UI we have some fields and if we pull up and refresh this page we should see those inputs here filled in I need to restart the server okay let's try this again all right so we've got our fields everything is looking great we've got our number of cycles or iterations and we can sort of like step through that if we wanted to we've got our plan if you wanted to offer multiple different like levels that you could switch to you might have some some more plans than this for now we just have one it's a little bit odd because it's in a select box but that's okay and then we have our Update button but when we click our Update button it's sending a put request to this route subscriptions slash sub ID but we have not set that up on the server yet so let's head back to the server and implement a new put route that will receive all of this data that was passed to us from the client and then it will create a schedule and modify the subscription okay so here on the server what we want to do is add a new put route okay so it's actually going to look pretty close to this so we're going to call this update subscription and we want to instead of returning a template here we're gonna JSON a PHY a schedule that we're going to create okay so the step 1 is create schedule from subscription step 2 is to update the schedule and or with a phase for the temp plan okay so in order to create the schedule from the existing subscription it's pretty simple you just say schedule is a new stripe subscription scheduled stripe subscription scheduled create and then we pass in from subscription and the subscription ID okay quite simple and then in order to update the schedule we need to pass in a couple things we need to pass in the current phase or so so yeah we're gonna pass in three different phases we need the current phase the temporary phase and then the phase that we're going to release to so the phase that we want to go back to and transition back to at the end so we need the current phase we need the temporary phase and then we want the like end result phase it's like back to the old current okay so in order to create the current phase we want access to the existing the current plan and the current quantity of those of those plans so in order to do that I'm going to say current plan and pull this directly out of the subscription so we're gonna have a subscription item on the subscription subscription dot items data zero okay let's grab that subscription item and then we want to grab the plan plan ID and then we also want the current quantity so the subscription item quantity and that'll be a number for the number of that plan on that subscription item again we're sort of assuming there's just one plan per subscription here if you had multiple plans you might need to iterate over to grab all a list of all the current plans their current quantities and settings and things so we've got our current plan we've got our current quantity we want our new plan or temp let's call it temp plan and that's going to be from the data that we're receiving from the post request or the put request so this will be in quest JSON I believe plan and our temp iterations is going to be in request dot JSON iterations ok so now when we update the subscription schedule with the phase so we want to pass in these phases so we want to say schedule is stripe subscription schedules modify we're gonna pass the first argument is the ID of the schedule we want to change the next argument is going to be all of our keyword arguments for the the params that we want to use to modify this so we want to pass in a end behavior release this means after the last phase after the last iteration of the last phase release this the subscription from the schedule so that it's no longer managed by the schedule and it's back to being just a typical stripe subscription that will renew on a consistent basis and there's no more changes applied to it you can also have an end behavior of cancel if you wanted to like set up you subscription schedules for some very complex way to collect installments or something so we're saying end behavior is release now what we want to do is we want to apply our phases so remember let's see so I'm going to create these sort of as placeholders so we want three phases here this is going to be the current phase this is going to be the new phase temp phase and then this is going to be like revert back to old phase so the subscription schedule operates on phases each phase represents some set of durations or some set of time that a a subscription is in a certain state so the current phase we want to we want to pass the current phase in order to end the current phase before starting the temporary phase so here what we want to do is we want to say that this is the end date for this is now and we need to pass a start date so that the subscription schedule knows which phase were talking about and so it's kind of it uses dates to identify which phases we're talking about and so we need to pass a start date that represents the subscription that we're modifying current phase so the start date for the current phase is going to be subscription dot current current what is this hmm current phase start I believe let's see no current period starting okay so this is going to be the UNIX timestamp for the current periods start on the subscription so if you have a subscription that was created five months ago it's a monthly subscription and it is it maybe it renewed on the first of this month and we're on the 14th of this month then the current period start is going to be the UNIX timestamp for the first of this month when the cycle the period for the subscription started and we want to use that so that we are applying the change now if you wanted you could set the end date to the current period end if you didn't want to apply the change until the end of that phase we're gonna choose to apply this immediately to give immediate relief to our users or our customers in this hypothetical scenario okay the each each phase has a required field and that is the plans for that phase so even though we're working on the current phase we still need to pass in the current plans so this is a list of plan objects and this mirrors pretty closely the items that are on a subscription so plans here is going to have plan and this is going to be current plan and quantity which is going to be the current quantity alright let's add the temporary phase now so we want the start date for the temporary phase to be now we want the instead of using an end date we can use iterations we want this temporary phase to last some number of iterations that we collected on the front end and we stored in temp iterations and then we need to pass in the plans a list of plans which will include just one item and that's going to be the plans that we are the temporary plan that were shifting to and the we're going to keep the quantity the same as the current quantity so if a user for example had they had a we're working with CRM maybe they had a five seat license so they were buying five of these plans we want to give them a discount on all five of the plans and so we're going to give them the $79 a month version of the plan but the same quantity of those plans so we want to use the current quantity here so current quantity okay and then finally we're going to revert back to the old phase which is going to use this same plans and we want this to last for one iteration and that's just so that we have a final phase that we are shifting the subscription back to before releasing it if we were not if we if we did not add this final phase then we would release into the temporary phase so we want to add this final phase so that it has something it knows how to go back to what the old the old setup was alright so this I believe this is a good starting point let's go run this and see if we have any errors I'm going to restart the server and then from the client I'm going to refresh the page I know that was quite a bit of setup in order to get those phases just right and then I'm going to click yep so we've got on our standard budget plan here let's click update and we get a four oh five method not allowed I think that's because I made this a get method yeah so we need to add methods equals the list that includes put because we're sending a put request restart the server refresh the page and then let's click update again and now we're getting a 500 that's different and that's good now we can see if we have an issue here okay subscription I wasn't sure if I needed to use which which way I can access this so this should be in here all right Python thank you let's restart refresh the page and try this again so we'll clear the console we're looking at the network tab here so we're gonna click update we see the request going we got a 200 that's fantastic and then if we if we take a look at what was logged to the console here we can see that it was success it finished we have a subscription scheduled so let's go in the dashboard and check out what this looks like so I'm going to pull up that subscription in the dashboard and we've got our CRM test customer here they we have an updated schedule so we have we have a subscription that is right now changing from standard to standard budget and we have the yeah so we can see here that the we just started this subscription yesterday for 99 dollars and we are converting this into a the standard budget so the upcoming invoice if we look at the upcoming invoice for May 13th which is in one month from now well see that there is a proration item on here so on the upcoming invoice view for this we see that we're going to charge $60 and 48 cents and that's because we have some unused time because we created the subscription for $99.99 yesterday and we are now we want to charge $79.99 going forward so it's prorating the cost of that and then applying it at the next renewal so there's a couple of different controls that you have under the proration behavior flag so you can pass that you want to always create invoices immediately and charge now you can pass that you want to create preparations meaning we want to charge later but for the prorated amounts or you can pass none which means don't prorate anything but collect the new amounts at a future date so we can pass those proration behaviors in but this is kind of what the default looks like so this is working as expected and now we have some lumpy payments for this CRM test customer so they are creating the subscription schedule and applying these different phases so that we're moving to a sort of a different price and we're going to move back to our normal price I hope that this was useful or that you've learned something about subscription schedules again it's really kind of an advanced feature if you have any questions about it we'd be happy to chat through those over on IRC we're in the freenode striped channel we're also available at support stripe comm stay safe stay healthy and we'll see you next time you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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