Patronage and negative invoice items

[gwen...@blacknut.com]

Hi,

We would like to allow paid subscribers to invite friends. For each friend that becomes a paid subscriber too, we would offer one free week to the first user.

The subscription is on a monthly plan.

We don't want to use coupon as Stripe can only use one coupon at a time and if a user invites 3 friends, we don't want to have to store 2 coupons while using the 1st one and automatically detect the end of a coupon to use the next one.

So we are having a look at negative invoice items which seem to do the trick, but we have a few questions:

1) If a user invites 1 friend, gets 1 negative invoice item then cancels his subscription. 

At the end of the paid period, will the negative item be handled like a refund for this user? We don't want that, we would like the item to be lost to the user if he cancels the subscription (or be kept for later use if the user re-subscribes).

2) If a user invites 10 friends and get 10 negative items, the sum of which being greater than the plan's cost, will he also get refunded when the next invoice comes? We don't want that either, we would like items to be spread through invoices so that for example the first 2 invoices have amount 0€ and the third one is lessened with what is left of negative items

Do negative invoice items allow these particular cases?

Or should we use something else?

Thanks in advance for any help on this,

Kind regards

[Remi J.]

Hey Gwenaelle!

Invoice items are definitely what I would recommend to use here, especially as your "free" period is shorter than the billing cycle itself. Let me answer each question inline!

1) If a user invites 1 friend, gets 1 negative invoice item then cancels his subscription. 

At the end of the paid period, will the negative item be handled like a refund for this user? We don't want that, we would like the item to be lost to the user if he cancels the subscription (or be kept for later use if the user re-subscribes).

This would never trigger a refund. What would happen is that they would get an invoice with a negative amount at the end of the period which would then be added to their account balance. This balance can not be used for one-time charges and only works with invoices. It would apply to future invoices, for example if they ever subscribed to a new plan. If you don't want this, you would have to update their account balance back to 0 after the last invoice is generated, or delete the invoice item(s) when you cancel a subscription.

2) If a user invites 10 friends and get 10 negative items, the sum of which being greater than the plan's cost, will he also get refunded when the next invoice comes? We don't want that either, we would like items to be spread through invoices so that for example the first 2 invoices have amount 0€ and the third one is lessened with what is left of negative items

Similar to the logic above, that credit will go to the account balance and count towards future invoices.

Hope this helps!

Remi 

[gwen...@blacknut.com]

Hi Remi,

Thanks a lot for your answer, helpful and clear :)

Negative invoice items it is then!

Have a nice day,

Gwenaelle