I don’t want Stripe to pester my subscribers

Hi, so that I understand your question/issue correctly. Did you carry out the following instructions below to create you Stripe button?

https://simple-membership-plugin.com/sca-compliant-stripe-subscription-button/

Regards.

Yes. Here’s the situation. I want to offer a free trial period and for renewal to be lower price than the original subscription. The only way to allow the free trial is to make the join button a stripe “subscription.” I have no way to tell what will happen when the “subscription” runs out. Will Stripe try to charge them again? Will Stripe send them email asking them to re-up? Stripe has no way to know about the lower price renewal. Stripe has no field to limit the number of renewals (to none, in this case).

I want them to not receive email from Stripe. If they visit the site again and try to access restricted content, that’s soon enough to remind them to renew.

I don’t see how to make all those things happen.

Hi, have you read the following documentation about offering Trial periods?

https://simple-membership-plugin.com/offer-customers-free-trial-period/

Regards.

I have, but it’s all about Paypal and so it doesn’t address my question, which is specifically about Stripe. Perhaps there’s some way to make Stripe behave as I am asking it should. Maybe it already does. I can’t tell from your documentation, and waiting until the end of the initial subscription period to find out seems like too long to wait for a solution.

Hi, the Stripe subscription button also has a trial period option available.

Regards.

No, you can’t do that with the standard Stripe subscription payment option that our plugin uses. Stripe won’t give that option for recurring payments. Once a subscription is setup, the recurring charges are completely controlled by Stripe (not our plugin).

We use the standard stripe subscription payment which works the way it is explained on the following page:
https://simple-membership-plugin.com/sca-compliant-stripe-subscription-button/

Normally, you will explain the charges upfront to your customers on your landing page (so the customers know what the payment structure looks like). Stripe does show to the customers clearly that it will be a recurring charge (for a subscription payment checkout).

You will need to use one time payments if you don’t want automatic recurring charges to happen. So you can offer a free trial with a one time payment. Then later, the customers can buy a membership with another one time payment (no automatic recurring payment).

You can also create one time renewal buttons that are at a lower price and is only offered to your members:
https://simple-membership-plugin.com/creating-membership-renewal-button/

So to be clear: there is no trial period with the Stripe Buy Now option, and there is no way to prevent Stripe attempting to charge them again automatically the same amount with the Stripe Subscription option. So there is no way to have a trial period AND a different renewal price with your plugin AND STRIPE.

Have I missed something?

I don’t want to have to explain it to my customers why I can’t make the renewal system work in a reasonable way. I want instead to explain to my customers the REASONABLE way in which the system works — but to do that, it has to be possible to set it up to work reasonably.

With our plugin, we use the simple/standard Stripe checkout option where the subscription product is actually configured INSIDE your Stripe account (not our plugin). Then you will enter the ID of that created subscription product inside our simple membership plugin’s button (for reference). So whatever Stripe allows you to create when you create a subscription product in your Stripe account is the limit. Our plugin doesn’t control that.

So you can ask this question to Stripe in terms of what is reasonable when creating a subscription product within their platform.

When you are creating a subscription product within the Stripe platform, they have the full control. After the product is created, you enter the reference ID of that product so our plugin can start that subscription for a member (when the member does a checkout).