Testing subscription renewals on Stripe

Question

I am using Stripe to test how my code would react to recurring subscription renewal payment attempts for a product we are working on (need to test success, failure ...etc.). And it seems that most answers on StackOverflow suggest creating a subscription with a recurring payment of 1 day (which is the minimum recurring payment available at Stripe), and waiting until next day to see how my code would react to the webhook notifications. (By the way, I could not find much documentation on Stripe to suggest testing methodologies for recurring payment).

I do not agree much with this approach, because it stretches the testing of my code to more than a week, maybe even two, but in normal conditions I might finish that testing within a couple of hours.

I think one of the following two approaches would be sufficient to do my coding/testing.

1. Find a way to make recurring subscription interval happen on shorter custom periods, such as every 15 minutes, or every 10 minutes.

2. A better solution is to make recurring subscriptions trigger on demand. That is, I create a subscription, and then I would update the date for the next renewal manually to a custom value, such as "1 minute in the future" or "30 seconds in the future" which would trigger the payment attempt.

Is there a way of doing any of those two options in Stripe? If neither is a viable option, how do I test recurring payments efficiently.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Our solution was to reset the billing cycle of the subscription.

• open the subscription in Stripe
• click "Actions" in the upper right
• select "Update Subscription"
• be sure to switch off "Prorate changes"
• scroll down and open "Advanced Options"
• check "Reset billing cycle"
• and finally... Update Subscription

This will trigger a new subscription payment and all the associated webhooks.