In a support discussion about Admin creating subscription for user, Jonathan5 asks whether a forum admin can manually start subscriptions for multiple users, possibly via bank transfer or by impersonating users with a 100% off coupon. pfaffman suggests managing users via a manually created group instead of using the subscription plugin, especially if few firms will request this. Jonathan5 clarifies he’d only allow one-off payments, not recurring ones. RGJ proposes selling coupon codes to firms to handle subscriptions themselves, though Jonathan5 notes coupons lack redemption limits. Later, Jonathan5 realizes one-off payments grant perpetual group membership — not time-limited — and concludes manual group management is sufficient. pfaffman adds that even free coupons may require a credit card and jokes about over-automating simple tasks. Jonathan5 humorously insists, “Things should be automated at all costs!!” The consensus leans toward manual group management for simplicity, unless the use case scales significantly.
Continuing the discussion from Discourse Subscriptions:
If a firm preferred to pay for multiple users’ subscriptions at once (probably by bank transfer) is there any way for me as forum administrator to start subscriptions for users?
I guess it would be possible to impersonate the user and apply a secret “100% off” coupon while “paying” for a non-recurring subscription with my own credit card. Would there be any potential pitfalls there?
Are there any other ways? Thanks.
I think it nice be possible at the rails console to add that subside/subscription ID to all of those users. I would need to look at the source carefully to figure that out.
But the thing to do would is probably to just create a group for those users by hand and manage it manually and not use the plugin.
Are you expecting many firms to do this?
I would not allow this for recurring payments, so I guess the answer depends on whether I make one-off payments sufficiently more expensive 
I don’t think that the plugin will he’ll with this use case.
Just “sell” them the coupon codes and let your client firm handle the subscriptions.
It will also free you of a user management burden.
I think the coupon codes can be redeemed multiple times and there is no way to set a maximum number of redemptions. So it might be problematic to try to sell coupons for, say, exactly 10 subscribers.
I think this is the answer, but now that I know that a one-off payment is for perpetual membership of the group I realise that the question is not something I needed to ask in the first place. For some reason I had thought that group membership after a one-off payment would expire after a year when sold alongside an annual subscription, but obviously that’s not how it works
Last I looked, even with free coupon a credit card was required.
You could make it a one year subscription and cancel it immediately. But unless you’re going to get a bunch of these memberships for big fish, you’ve spent more time on talking about this than it’ll take to manage it by hand. (I often spend hours automating a one time 10 minute job. 
)
Things should be automated at all costs!!