How does uninstalling the Subscriptions plugin affect Stripe billing?

[RBoy]

@blake

If you were to shut down your instance of Discourse, uninstall this plugin or your site were to go offline, Stripe will continue to bill your customers for your service until the subscription is cancelled.

Can you elaborate on this, it’s not clear - when you say uninstall this plugin, what exactly does that mean?

Does that mean remove it from app.yml, rebuild and then take the site offline? If the site is offline, then plugin won’t be running so how’s that different from uninstalling the plugin?

I assume that strip will continue to bill customers on a recurring basis until the subscriptions are cancelled. How does one cancel all existing subscriptions before taking the site offline?

On a related note, if the site is offline, for say 1 week due for maintenance, is there a way to suspend the subscription or offer a partial refund? Just curious.

[blake (Blake Erickson)]

@RBoy

Can you elaborate on this, it’s not clear - when you say uninstall this plugin, what exactly does that mean?

Uninstalling would be remove it from app.yml, rebuild and then keep the site up.

@RBoy

If the site is offline, then plugin won’t be running so how’s that different from uninstalling the plugin?

It’s not you can just take it offline without uninstalling it.

@RBoy

I assume that strip will continue to bill customers on a recurring basis until the subscriptions are cancelled.

Yes.

@RBoy

How does one cancel all existing subscriptions before taking the site offline?

Go to this page as an admin and click the cancel button for each subscriber:

@RBoy

On a related note, if the site is offline, for say 1 week due for maintenance, is there a way to suspend the subscription or offer a partial refund? Just curious.

Not through the subscription plugin UI, maybe there is something in Stripe.

[RBoy]

@blake

Uninstalling would be remove it from app.yml, rebuild and then keep the site up.

Okay. I’m still not understanding what this statement means?

If you were to shut down your instance of Discourse, uninstall this plugin or your site were to go offline

What does “uninstall this plugin or your site were to go offline” mean? Why would I need to uninstall this plugin if the subscription runs independently on strip’s cloud?

@blake

Go to this page as an admin and click the cancel button for each subscriber:

Thanks for the clarification. If I may suggest an enhancement, it would be cool to have an option to “Cancel all subscriptions” (with appropriate warnings and double confirmations) which can be a one click solution to taking the site offline.

[MarkDoerr]

@RBoy

Can you elaborate on this, it’s not clear - when you say uninstall this plugin, what exactly does that mean?

Does that mean remove it from app.yml, rebuild and then take the site offline? If the site is offline, then plugin won’t be running so how’s that different from uninstalling the plugin?

Yes, to uninstall the plugin, you’d need to remove it from your app.yml file then rebuild the app. At that point the site is running, but the plugin is no longer installed/available.

If the site were offline, sure, the plugin wouldn’t be running but then neither would the site. Is that what you’re trying to accomplish?

@RBoy

Why would I need to uninstall this plugin if the subscription runs independently on strip’s cloud?

While subscriptions are maintained in Stripe, a benefit of the plugin is that subscribers are added/removed from Discourse groups automatically based on their subscription status. You could do that manually if you want, but the plugin makes it far easier to manage.

@RBoy

If I may suggest an enhancement, it would be cool to have an option to “Cancel all subscriptions” (with appropriate warnings and double confirmations) which can be a one click solution to taking the site offline.

Thanks for this. We’ll keep that in mind for future feature development.