Re-activating Paymill subscription, and updating Credit Card info

Question

Paymill's API is awesome. It's a blaze to work with, and I should be up&running, were it not for an edge case. Context is a SAAS app, with a demo trial, and the ability to upgrade & downgrade at will.

• User cancels her subscription: at this point, her account remains active until the pre-payment date. Paymill receives 2 API calls:

  • DELETE call for https://api.paymill.com/v2/subscriptions/
  • DELETE call for https://api.paymill.com/v2/payments/

Scenario: She changes her mind, and tries to upgrade again. So far, I've tried modeling this via:

• Doing a POST to https://api.paymill.com/v2/subscriptions with client, offer, and payment info -similar to the original subscription- returns Payment error: Subscription already connected
• Doing a PUT to https://api.paymill.com/v2/subscriptions/ with payment info (according to Paymill API: How do I update a subscription's credit card? ) returns Payment error: the Subscription was canceled

Desired output is Continuing Subscription: no credit card charges are made until the next monthly period, and further CC charges are applied via the new payment info.

In what ways can this be achieved?

Many thanks!

Answer 1

Let me start by saying that the POST you described should be possible to execute. This is currently a bug, and this will be fixed sometime next week.

But your use case is, unfortunately, not supported at the moment. We are working hard to make our subscriptions feature more powerful, while retaining the simplicity of usage. We cannot offer a timeline for this, but we would love to hear more about your case.

Currently, merchants are encouraged to manage the subscriptions on their own, as this is not a simple matter of changing the amounts being charged on the next subscription's due date. For instance, if a client of yours decide to downgrade, would you make a pro-rata refund of the excess? Same for upgrade: would you charge the full amount of the new subscription on the due date, or a pro-rata of the old subscription + pro-rata of the new?

That said, I'd encourage you to keep an eye on our blog for announcements of an improved subscriptions handling.

Disclosure: I work at PAYMILL.