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Billing Issues & Grace Periods

If a customer is unable to complete their purchase due to an invalid or expired payment method, supported stores offer an optional grace period. Grace periods allow the customer to retain access to their subscription purchase for a short period of time while the store attempts to renew the subscription. This prevents disruption for paid features, and can improve the user experience for your app.

Grace Periods are optional and customizable on certain platforms.

StoreRequired?Duration
App StoreOptionalCustomizable
Google PlayOptionalCustomizable
StripeOptionalCustomizable
Amazon❌ Not supportedN/A

Encountering Billing Issues​

As mentioned, billing issues occur when a user is unable to complete a subscription purchase due to an invalid or expired payment method. When this occurs, RevenueCat sends a BILLING_ISSUE event to webhooks, integrations, and the customer history page.

RevenueCat will only send one billing issue event -- additional payment failures won't trigger additional billing issue events, unless a renewal is successful between payment failures or the subscription ends and is restarted.

SDK Prompt​

Starting in iOS 16.4+, a system-sheet will automatically be displayed if a user encounters a billing issue, with a prompt for the customer to update their payment method. You can test this behavior by following Apple's instructions.

  1. Make a sandbox purchase on a real device using iOS 16.4+
  2. Once the purchase is completed, background or close the app
  3. Disable renewals in Settings -> App Store -> Sandbox Account -> Manage
  4. Wait a few minutes (depending on the product duration) and allow the subscription to attempt renewal. Renewal will fail.
  5. Relaunch or reopen your app, and see the billing issue prompt

Stripe​

Stripe provides some additional options for how to handle what occurs after a customer encounters an issue with their payment. You can find these options in your Stripe dashboard under Settings > Billing > Subscriptions and email > Manage failed payments. In each case, we will only generate one billing issue event.

  1. cancel the subscription: RevenueCat will revoke access and generate a CANCELLATION event with the reason set to BILLING_ERROR.
  2. mark the subscription as unpaid: RevenueCat will revoke access but continues generating RENEWAL events with a zero price while the invoice remains open.
  3. leave the subscription past-due: RevenueCat will not revoke access and will continue generating RENEWAL events with a zero price. The subscription remains in place but no further payments are attempted.

If you have not made an update to this setting, the default behavior is to cancel the subscription after all retries fail.

Entering a Grace Period​

When a subscription enters a grace period, RevenueCat detects the change automatically. Users will retain access to their subscriptions, but we'll immediately send events indicating the subscription has been cancelled. These subscriptions are considered cancelled because they are now past due, but will not be considered expired until the end of their grace period. During this time, a subscription may convert to paid through additional billing attempts from the store or by the customer updating their billing information.

API, Events, and Webhooks​

To detect grace periods in webhook events, watch for the value of grace_period_expiration_at_ms. This property is only valid for BILLING_ISSUE events.

To detect grace periods in the GET /subscriber endpoint, watch for the value of grace_period_expires_date on a subscription object and compare it to the current date. This property will be null if the subscription is not in a grace period.

Once a user corrects their payment method, RevenueCat will send a renewal event. This will reset the grace_period_expires_date property to null in the GET /subscriber endpoint.

📘Stripe and Grace Periods

The property grace_period_expires_date will always be null for Stripe subscriptions, even those in a billing retry period. This is due to how Stripe creates transactions - when a payment fails, the grace period is already included in the expiration date of the new transaction. If all payment retries fail, expires_date will be updated.

Dashboard​

Customers who enter into a grace period will have events added to their Customer History.

Screen Shot 2022-09-15 at 2.46.12 PM.png

Additionally, subscriptions that are currently in a grace period will still be considered "active," since the customer retains access to their entitlement throughout their grace period. Distinct customers who are currently in a grace period can be counted through Customer Lists using the "Billing Issue Trial" and "Billing Issue" statuses.