--- title: Subscription trials without payment details upfront slug: subscription-trials-without-payment-details-upfront published_at: 2022-11-04 14:00:36 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:51:58 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn how to use Stripe Checkout to start a Subscription on a trial without a payment method. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 02:53 Configure the `subscription_data` object for trials 03:50 Configure the customer portal 04:51 Configure email reminders and the no-code customer portal 05:28 Using test clocks to advance time and test your integration 10:10 Conclusion ### Resources Configure a free trial without payment details https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/free-trials Stripe Checkout https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout Checkout 101: https://stripe.com/docs/videos/checkout-101 ### 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/VjNqzRhotM2snYo #stripe #payments #subscriptions tags: [stripe, payments, ecommerce, stripedev, Subscription trials without payment details upfront, @cjav_dev, subscription trials, cardless trials, stripe subscription trials, Start a trial without payment stripe, subscription trial checkout, checkout subscription trials without payment, subscription without payment details, stripe checkout trials, subscription trials with stripe checkout] views: 920 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/subscription-trials-without-payment-details-upfront youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Grjc-8tbw youtube_id: x9Grjc-8tbw embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/x9Grjc-8tbw thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/x9Grjc-8tbw/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Subscription trials without payment details upfront *Published: November 04, 2022* *Views: 920* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Grjc-8tbw) [![Subscription trials without payment details upfront](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/x9Grjc-8tbw/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Grjc-8tbw) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn how to use Stripe Checkout to start a Subscription on a trial without a payment method. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 02:53 Configure the `subscription_data` object for trials 03:50 Configure the customer portal 04:51 Configure email reminders and the no-code customer portal 05:28 Using test clocks to advance time and test your integration 10:10 Conclusion ### Resources Configure a free trial without payment details https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout/free-trials Stripe Checkout https://stripe.com/docs/payments/checkout Checkout 101: https://stripe.com/docs/videos/checkout-101 ### 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/VjNqzRhotM2snYo #stripe #payments #subscriptions ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back in this episode you're going to see how you can use stripe checkout to collect a customer's information to start a free trial without payment details let's get into it [Music] today we're going to use a stripe sample so we're going to say stripe samples create check out a single subscription and I'm going to call this one trials this is going to ask us what we want to use on the back end we'll use Ruby for our server now we'll jump into this trials directory that it created for us and you'll notice that in the root of the sample there is this new thing called a sample seed.json so this sample seed is going to automatically create the products and prices for us that are associated with the samples here we can say stripe fixtures and pass in Sample seed dot Json and then hit enter and that will create the products and prices using the API now if we head over to the stripe dashboard and refresh at the very top here we'll see two new products that were created a starter and a professional let's grab the price for the starter this is going to be the monthly price of twelve dollars and now we can open up our server directory and there's a DOT end file with our environment variables and that's where we're going to set in our price ID we also want to do the same thing for that Pro price that was created for us we're going to grab our price ID here and we're going to drop that into the Pro price now that we have our environment variables configured again because we're using the stripe CLI that's going to set our API keys for us now we can say jump into the server directory and bundle install that's going to install our dependencies next we can say Ruby server and that's going to fire up our Sinatra server and we can head over to localhost4242 to see what we've got going on so this is going to allow us to choose which plan we want the starter for 12 a month or professional for 18. let's start off with the starter plan who are redirected to stripe checkout and were asked for our payment details notice that nothing about this page signals that we're on a trial yet that's because we have not customized the checkout session in order to start a trial without payment method up front so let's jump into our server here we're going to open up server.rb and take a look at what we've got going on so this is the post route where we're creating checkout sessions we have an entire series all about how to set up stripe checkout so if you're not familiar head over and do the checkout 101 series it's available in the documentation or here on YouTube now when we create the checkout session we can also pass in subscription underscore data this is going to allow us to configure the subscription that is created by stripe checkout when the customer goes through that flow now inside of subscription data here we can set trial period days to some number of days that we want to offer a trial for maybe 14 days okay we also want to set payment method collection to if required that means I will only collect the payment method if it's required immediately all right let's restart our server and take a look at this flow one more time localhost 4242 now when we select the starter plan and we're redirected to stripe checkout instead of collecting all of our payment details we're just asked for our email address we can see that we're going to start a free trial that it's 14 days free and then it's 12 dollars per month after that so here we can enter test at example.com and hit start trial and that is how we start this free trial now one of the recommendations that you'll find from the documentation is that we should use the billing portal or the customer portal in order to enable customers to update and add a payment method on file so right now this demo already has support for adding that button at the bottom and customers can come in here add a payment method and maybe they want to add a 4242 card in here and hit add and now when their trial expires this is the card that will be charged for that 12 a month plan it's also possible to use a no code customer portal where they can enter the email address they used at checkout and receive an email they're redirected to this page the one other thing that we might want to do is inside of our server where we're handling web hooks is listen for a specific event type so right now that we have an event that we're listening for checkout session completed we might also want to say if the event type is [Music] customer.subscription.trial will end then we want to email the customer with a link to the portal so from the stripe dashboard you can head over to the settings and under the customer portal settings if you scroll to the very bottom there is a section for a no code customer portal so here if you don't see this link you can click generate link otherwise you can copy that link and that is the link that we want to send customers to so we're going to send them back to that exact email address now this customer subscription trial will end event is only going to fire 14 days after they start the subscription so you might be wondering how can we actually test that this is going to work as expected well one option is to use this feature of the API called test clocks so what we could do this is sort of an advanced approach is say we want to create a new test clock it's going to be an API call to stripe under the test helper's namespace testclock.create and we're going to give it a frozen time and that's going to be time.now.2i that's just the Unix timestamp for the current time we also need to create a customer object stripe customer.create and we're going to pass in that test clock test clock.id and then we want to use this customer when we create the checkout session that way the resulting subscription is associated with this test clock that we can use to simulate moving through time so that we can ensure that we're handling that trial will end event properly so now we can say customer is customer.id and this is also going to sort of pin uh this checkout session to a a specific customer that we just created all right so next what we can do is let's restart our server walk through this flow and I'll show you what I mean by test clocks localhost 4242 we're going to select the professional version this time you'll see that we still have 14 days free and then it's going to be 18 per month after that I'm going to enter in an email address here and hit enter now if we look into the stripe dashboard under our customers we see a brand new customer was created here at the top and you'll notice that there is a clock here there's this orange clock that means that this customer is associated with a simulation so what we can do is we can go to the test clock and this enables us to move through time so we could Advance time but before we do so we want to make sure that we're listening for webhook events that are firing on our account so I'm going to open a new tab here and say stripe listen dash dash forward to localhost 4242 webhook that's going to form a direct connection between stripe in my local machine so that when events happen on my stripe account those are delivered to our local running web hook Handler okay now if we say Advanced time and because we're on a 14-day trial maybe we would end on the 28th but let's move us all the way to the 30th and click on Advanced now in the logs you'll notice that we have started an event for advancing the test clock we also see that invoice upcoming is firing and here we see that the customer subscription trial will end so if we go look in the server logs here we see email the customer with a link to the portal and this is the actual customer portal no code customer portal link so if I were to open this up this gives us a way to enter our email address that we used at checkout and send a code so that actually sent a code to me so that was entered on my phone received on my phone entered in and now here I can see okay I this is where I need to go to update my payment method on file so I'm going to add a payment method here let's add again maybe this time we'll add a U.S bank account enter the same email address put my name in and we're going to use a test institution so in production this would be a list of actual live production banks that you could authenticate with and connect directly to your customers account and then they can add that and from here forward now they will be charged this 18 per month as part of their plan so again we can go back to the stripe dashboard and we can advance time once more if we wanted this time maybe let's add a month and a day or so and we'll advance now again time is advancing and we can see in the logs for The Listener that we have the customer was updated we have a payment intents that are processing charges that are being processed we have invoices being finalized so lots of things are happening as this clock is advancing it does take a little bit of time to fully Advance if we head back over to the customer and look at their subscription we'll notice that this is now on a an active professional subscription and the next invoice is going to be on November 28th the again the the clock is now pinned to October 31st we are seeing now 18 is going to be charged again on our next invoice and if we scroll down we can see that we actually have paid an invoice here on the 18th now because we're using ACH the funds have not actually been confirmed but they will after a couple of days these are going to be fully processed and settled into our account so that's how we can set up a free trial without collecting payment details up front and how we can use test clocks to simulate moving through time and handling that customer.subscription.trial will end event you can head over to the documentation to learn more there's also a couple different betas for handling When Trials expire without a payment method type if you're interested in participating in that beta you can send an email to billingdashtrials.beta stripe.com thank you so much for your time and attention really appreciate it and we'll see in the next one [Music] --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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