Sometimes, you want to provide your customers with a “Try before you buy” solution. With Stripe Checkout, you can add a trial period when setting up subscriptions so your customers aren’t charged for a certain period of time until the subscription kicks in.
If this is something you’d like to implement, let’s have a look at how to do it.
Setting up a subscription with Stripe Checkout
For the purpose of this post, I'm only going to focus on the code sample responsible for creating the Checkout session and handling the trial period. If you'd like more details about the entire code needed server-side, please refer to our interactive integration builder.
The sample below shows the minimum amount of code you need to implement a standard subscription functionality (in Node.js):
const session = await stripe.checkout.sessions.create({
billing_address_collection: 'auto',
line_items: [
{
price: '{{PRICE_ID}}',
quantity: 1,
},
],
mode: 'subscription',
success_url: `${YOUR_DOMAIN}?success=true`,
cancel_url: `${YOUR_DOMAIN}?canceled=true`,
});
The Stripe documentation has code samples for a few other languages so I would recommend you check it out if you’d like to use another popular programming language.
What this code does is create a Checkout session for a subscription, for a single product referenced by its price ID.
To find a product's price ID, navigate to a product's page in the Stripe dashboard, and under the Pricing section, each price should show an ID starting with price_.
At this point, if a customer goes through the checkout process, they will be charged right away.
Adding a trial period
If you'd like to add a trial period for a subscription, you can do so by using subscription_data to add a trial_period_days number. This number needs to be an integer and at least equal to 1.
Overall, a subscription with a trial period of 2 weeks would be written this way:
const session = await stripe.checkout.sessions.create({
billing_address_collection: 'auto',
line_items: [
{
price: '{{PRICE_ID}}',
quantity: 1,
},
],
mode: 'subscription',
subscription_data: {
trial_period_days: 14
},
success_url: `${YOUR_DOMAIN}?success=true`,
cancel_url: `${YOUR_DOMAIN}?canceled=true`,
});
If all goes well, when testing out your checkout page, you should see it mention the 14 days trial.
After this change, if a customer goes through the checkout process for this subscription, the first time they will be charged will be 14 days later.
In the Stripe dashboard, subscriptions with a trial period are indicated with a specific badge.
Creating a subscription without Stripe Checkout
If you're handling subscriptions without using Stripe Checkout, there's an additional way to indicate a trial period.
First, the sample below shows how to create a subscription using a customer ID and price ID.
const subscription = await stripe.subscriptions.create({
customer: 'cus_111aaa222bbb',
items: [
{
price: 'price_333ccc444ddd',
},
],
});
Adding a trial period can be done by using trial_end with a timestamp, for example:
const subscription = await stripe.subscriptions.create({
customer: 'cus_111aaa222bbb',
items: [
{
price: 'price_333ccc444ddd',
},
],
trial_end: 1648760166,
});
Ending a trial early
If you want to end a trial early, you can update a subscription via an API call, setting trial_end to a new value or, now to end immediately.
stripe.subscriptions.update('sub_555eee666fff', {
trial_end: 'now',
});
If you'd prefer to make the update via the Stripe dashboard, visit the subscriptions page, select the subscription you'd like to update, under the Actions dropdown, select "update subscription", modify the date in the "Free trial days" date picker and save your changes by clicking on the "update subscription" button.
That's it! With a couple of lines of code, you can offer a free trial period and give people the opportunity to test out your product(s)!
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Top comments (8)
How to prevent users from starting infinite trials? For example, the user starts a 30-day free trial, cancels on the 29th, then creates another account and starts another 30-day free trial. Is there a way to stop this from happening?
You store the trial start and end date in your database.
Whenever you starts a subscription, you check these dates, and if the current date is not within this period, you don't offer a subscription with trial period.
Else you offer a subscription with the days left (trialEndDate - currentDate)
I think you missed the "creates another account" part.
Hi Renan,
Did you figure this out by any chance?
Hi there,
Is stripe actually advising against Free Trials since they I saw it's marked as "Legacy".
I remember reading that actually giving a free tier + upgrade paths + 30 or 60 refund policy has better conversions than automatically giving free trials to new registered users.
Thoughts?
Thanks
Vincenzo Belpiede
ShareDocView.com
Calendbook.com
Salesforza.com
Nice explanation, thanks !
If I don't want to force customers to enter payment details when creating the free trial subscription, do any of these methods offer any advantages over the other one?
Ie: using the Checkout API will add an extra step to the user, while using the Subscription API option allows me to silently create a customer and subscription when the user signs up, so the user does not have to know or worry about anything until the trial period ends.
Is there any advantage or better use case for the Checkout API?
One question, After 7 days, stripe will deduct subscription price. But how will i manage that data(trial end, subscription start etc) from my side? I mean when my trial period will end and actual period start, how to update data to my database? could you help regarding this?
Use webhooks
stripe.com/docs/webhooks