Discourse Subscriptions - clarify "Cancel at end of cycle"

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The discussion clarifies the behavior of subscription cancellation in Discourse Subscriptions, highlighting a discrepancy between user and admin actions. Jonathan5 notes that users can cancel auto-renewal at the end of the billing cycle by setting cancel_at_period_end: true, which keeps the subscription active until renewal but prevents future charges. This results in the subscription status remaining ‘Active’ for the user, though it shows as ‘cancelled’ for renewal. However, the admin interface does not clearly indicate this partial cancellation. In contrast, when an admin cancels a subscription, it is immediately deleted via the customer.subscription.deleted webhook, resulting in a ‘canceled’ status and removal from the subscribed group. The post suggests improving clarity in the interface by aligning the terminology and displaying the same ‘Status’ column as the user interface to avoid confusion between canceling auto-renewal versus fully canceling the subscription.

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Continuing the discussion from Discourse subscriptions - changing price - how to cancel auto-renewal instead of whole subscription:

Feature request: It would be good if the user could choose to cancel the subscription at the end of the cycle, instead of only being able to cancel it immediately.

I’ve seen this in the Stripe documentation, under the heading “Cancel at end of cycle”:

If you instead want to cancel the subscription at the end of the current billing period (that is, for the duration of time the customer has already paid for), update the subscription with a cancel_at_period_end value of true:

…

You can reactivate subscriptions scheduled for cancellation (with the cancel_at_period_end parameter) by updating cancel_at_period_end to false . You can reactivate the subscription at any point up to the end of the period.

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Discourse subscriptions - changing price during recurring subscription
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It turns out that the user can do what I asked (I’ve changed “allow” to “clarify” in the title now)… so here are two new but related…

Feature requests: The default wording should make clear the two types of cancellation. The admin interface should have the same “Status” column as the user interface.

Here are some details…

It seems that “cancel” in Discourse Subscriptions means two different things depending on who is doing it! For the user it only cancels auto-renewal; for the admin it cancels the whole subscription immediately.

  1. If the user clicks the bin icon at u/.../billing/subscriptions the prompt is “Are you sure you want to cancel this subscription?”

    Choosing Yes triggers the customer.subscription.updated webhook.

    Two notable parts of the response are "cancel_at_period_end": true and "status": "active". The user’s subscription page still stays “Status: Active” but for “Renews” it now states “cancelled”. The user remains in the subscribed group.

    Annoyingly, the admin interface doesn’t now indicate that auto-renewal has been cancelled – it just has “Status: active”.

  2. If the admin clicks “cancel” at /admin/plugins/discourse-subscriptions/subscriptions the prompt again is “Are you sure you want to cancel this subscription?” (it also asks about whether to refund).

    Choosing Yes triggers the customer.subscription.deleted webhook.

    The response includes "status": "canceled". The subscription is deleted everywhere and the user is removed from the subscribed group.

Discourse Subscriptions - user not removed from group when subscription cancelled