collect payment info now, charge later

[Igor Shmukler]

Hello,

We need to support a workflow where we collect customer information,
including the card, and possibly do some sort of authorization now,
then give customers a 60 days free trial.
We want to charge the card at the end of the trial period. The trial
is completely free. Customers have the right to cancel at the end of
the 59th day and they should not be charged.

What APIs would allow us to do this? We think that it might be
possible to use recurring payments API, though it seems to have been
designed for subscriptions.

We don't want to charge the card then refund if the customer cancels.
We believe that people won't like this. What are our options?

Thank you,

Igor Shmukler

[Remi J.]

Hey Igor,

The best option here would be to follow the "Set up future payments" guide [1]. The idea here is that you collect card details (or any payment details really) via the SetupIntents API where you don't take any payment upfront. Then later, once you are ready, you charge that customer through the PaymentIntent API for the amount you expected which is step 5 in that doc [2].

You're correct that the other APIs that would match are more tailored towards recurring payments in the Billing product. You could technically use the Subscription Schedules API [3] for this but I wouldn't recommend it in your case. For completeness though, you could put the customer on a trial for 60 days and then have a second phase that charges them the expected amount once and then cancels the schedule after that.

I hope this helps!

Remi

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/payments/save-and-reuse

[2] https://stripe.com/docs/payments/save-and-reuse?platform=web#web-create-payment-intent-off-session

[3] https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/subscription-schedules

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