Handling a 2-year subscription in Stripe

Question

I need to be able to handle two types of subscriptions that Stripe doesn't seem to support out of the box:

1. A lifetime subscription
2. A two-year subscription

Lifetime subscription is easy. I'll just create a single charge and be done with it. It would've been nice to have a subscription record that I could check for validity.

Two-year subscription is where I am not sure what to do. I figure I'd create a one year subscription (current max in Stripe) and will have to use web hooks for when a new invoice will be generated. What would be the proper way of cancelling an upcoming charge? I am also worried that customers will receive an email alerting them for an upcoming charge in the middle of the period. Any way to avoid this?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Stripe's subscriptions do not have a set end date. The 1 year maximum that you mention is the maximum interval, i.e. the frequency at which the customer will be billed.

If you want to end a subscription after a set number of payments, your best bet is to use webhooks to count the number of successful payments (via the invoice.payment_succeeded events) and cancel the subscription when the desired number of payments has been reached.

Stripe does not send emails to customers about upcoming charges. It can optionally send email receipts after a charge is created, but you can disable this from your dashboard.