Subscription lifecycle

Activate an accepted subscription

A subscription joins the customer account to a published plan version, billing currency, quantity and anniversary anchor. Preserve the accepted terms and any separate recurring-payment mandate. Activating the subscription records a commercial service relationship; it does not establish that a payment has settled.

The first billing interval uses explicit start and end instants. Subsequent periods follow the agreed anchor instead of adding an arbitrary number of days to the previous run. Date changes, leap years and month ends need a configured calendar policy. The customer sees the resulting service and billing dates before the terms take effect.

Apply changes on the agreed date

Plan and quantity changes record the target terms, effective instant and acceptance evidence. A requested upgrade remains distinct from an applied change. The system checks the current subscription version before applying it so two simultaneous requests cannot overwrite each other.

A plan’s new version never rewrites the old subscription history. The change preserves the before and after terms and supplies any proration evidence used by billing. A future-dated change can be withdrawn through its defined path; a change already applied needs a linked correction or new change, with any financial consequence reviewed separately.

Choose a transparent proration policy

A plan either disables proration or uses the configured actual-seconds method. Under that method, unused time is a fraction of the original half-open billing interval in UTC. The invoice preserves separate old-plan credit and new-plan charge lines rather than hiding them inside an unexplained net number.

For a change exactly halfway through an interval, a base charge of one hundred under the old plan gives fifty of unused credit. A new base charge of one hundred sixty gives eighty for the remaining half, producing a net increase of thirty before tax. Usage charges follow their accepted meter terms and are not automatically halved as if they were time-based base charges.

Pause or cancel with the right consequences

Pause, resume and cancel requests each retain an effective date. Cancellation at the period end stops the next renewal while preserving service and billing through the agreed endpoint. A cancelled subscription retains earlier invoices and the balance still collectible. It must not be deleted to make the account appear paid.

A paused subscription follows its configured billing and service policy. Payment failure can open collections without instantly cancelling the subscription. Any service suspension depends on the accepted terms and an explicit authorised transition; a failed email or unknown payment outcome cannot substitute for that decision.

Protect customer account boundaries

Customer users can inspect and request changes only for their own account. Staff identity, invoice corrections, pricing publication and provider tokens remain outside that self-service permission. Validate account scope and current terms on direct API requests and saved links as well as the visible portal. Billing staff can then explain which accepted change affected an invoice without exposing another customer’s subscription or payment information.