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I have set up a recurring payments profile using the Express Checkout API following these steps.

In my sandbox merchant & user accounts I see that the payments profile has been created, but no money has been sent and the profile is still in the "pending" state. See screenshot.

It is a subscription to a website, and I want to give the user immediate access. I could grant access to my website immediately when a profile is set up, but then a user could cancel the profile before the payment goes through and gain free temporary access to my site.

Alternatively, I could wait until the profile updates to "active" to grant access, but this may take many hours and I want to give the customer access as soon as possible.

How is a digital subscription like this usually handled? Should I be using a different Paypal service? Can I somehow speed up the initial transaction so that the initial payment is processed immediately instead of waiting a few hours? Or is it common practise to "not worry" about the potential of malicious users stealing a few free hours access?

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Crashthatch
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The best way is to treat the first payment as normal payment and start the subscription from the next period.

So for example for monthly subscription for 10$ user buys normal product for 10$ and you also create a subscription profile that is starting from the next month.

Jakub Korupczyński
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  • Using the INITAMT field, or just a normal payment? – Crashthatch Mar 04 '14 at 23:14
  • I am not sure how AMT in subscription works. When I wanted instant payments I was using normal payment for first and creating subscription profile with INITAMT of 0 and start date for next month/year/anything. If amount in subscription will do instant payment and don't set it for pending than it would also be ok, but I didn't test that. – Jakub Korupczyński Mar 04 '14 at 23:44
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    So it turns out INITAMT doesn't go immediately either (it takes up to 24 hours). Like you suggested, I ended up using a normal payment in addition to the subscription, which starts next month. Full calls with POST params for whole flow here: https://gist.github.com/Crashthatch/9378624 – Crashthatch Mar 05 '14 at 23:08