Offer free days in active subscriptions

[mellon_dev]

We have a web application and are using PayPal to offer monthly and yearly subscriptions to our customers. We use the PayPal API and webhooks to handle payments and subscriptions. In some circumstances (raffles, bug bounty, ...) we want to give dedicated customers with an active subscriptions some days for free (say 5-10 days). Is there any possibility to get this to work with PayPal? We thought about suspending and then activating a subscription, but unfortunately this will stay in the same billing cycle as before and there does not seem to be a possibility to set the next billing date (not allowed through the API).

Of course we do not want to force the customer to cancel and then re-subscribe, this would be a real no-go in this use case. Any advice is highly appreciated, thanks!

[mellon_dev · Accepted solution]

I wrote the technical support and this is what they replied. Unfortunately, giving some kind of free days or trial during an active subscription is not possible.

Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this. You can freely change the subscription amount 10 days before the payment date (eg: monthly price = $30. 5 days free for this cycle implies cycle price is essentially 30-5=$25. You can update price to amount).

Note that:  you will have to update and rollback if the discount is only for one month cycle and is not meant to continue
update should happen 10 days before the payment date

Update documentation :  https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/subscriptions/v1/#subscriptions_patch

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