Products

Subscriptions

Creating subscription products

Easily set up a subscription-based product to start earning recurring revenue. When adding a new product, be sure to select the “Subscription” option under the pricing section.

From there, you’ll have the option to set the product’s price, billing cycle, and intervals.

Additionally, if you’d like to add a free trial to your subscription product, simply enable the option and set the free trial length.

You can create subscriptions with yearly, monthly, weekly and daily billing intervals. Note that the maximum length of a billing period can be one year, 12 months, 52 weeks or 365 days.

The subscription lifecycle

When purchased, subscriptions will go through a range of statuses:

On trial
The subscription has started on a trial and is awaiting its first scheduled payment.

Active
The subscription is active and valid.

Paused
Payment collection has been paused and the subscription is still active.

Past due
A renewal payment has failed. Lemon Squeezy will attempt a number of payment retries.

Unpaid
All renewal retries have failed. The subscription may be in dunning depending on your store settings.

Cancelled
The customer or merchant has cancelled future payment collection. The subscription is valid until the end of the current billing period.

Expired
The subscription has ended.

Your customers should retain access to your app or product in all statuses apart from "Expired".

If you're integrating with the Lemon Squeezy API, you can listen for subscription changes using webhooks.

Updating the price of subscription products

If you change the price of a subscription product or variant, this will not change the price of existing subscriptions. Only future subscriptions will be charged at the new rate.

Existing subscriptions will always be charged the price that they were created with.

If you do want to change the price of an existing subscription you will need to change its plan, which can be done using the API or in the Dashboard (see below).

Managing subscriptions

You can change a subscription's product and cancel subscriptions in your dashboard.

You can also fully manage subscriptions using the Subscription API, allowing you to use Lemon Squeezy as your SaaS billing platform. Please check out our Developer guide for a run-through of what's possible.

For prorations, this is how the dashboard options line up with API requests:

  • "Apply changes with proration" is the same as making a request without invoice_immediately or disable_prorations (the default)
  • "Apply changes with proration and invoice immediately" is the same as using "invoice_immediately": true
  • "Apply changes without proration" is the same as using "disable_prorations": true
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