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I work at a Sydney-based construction & commercial law firm that is in the process of rolling-out 2x subscription-based legal service offerings using Stripe as the payment processor.

When it comes to legal work in Aus, the requirement for billing is that you can only bill for work that has been completed - i.e. client deposits money into our trust account and as work is completed invoices are raised against the trust account and funds dispersed to our office account. This requirement makes things a bit difficult when contemplating subscriptions, as subscriptions are essentially pre-paid.

Notwithstanding, an ideal scenario for us would be as follows: client sign-ups to our subscription via Stripe checkout > debit from account occurs 30days later (in arrears).

I am not a coder, I am a lawyer and I have been receiving mixed messages from developers that I have been talking to. Some say its doable, some say they need to build a custom payment management system to sit on top of Stripe.

My understanding of this page here: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/billing-cycle is that Stripe can do it natively, however I am unsure if this is the correct interpretation.

Given this, my question is: Can Stripe subscriptions be charged in arrears in the way describe above?

Many thanks

Michael Glinatsis
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2 Answers2

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Based on the docs, and as an IT guy with years of experience working with Stripe, I expect you'll have problems using this feature for what you're looking for.

You can use Stripe's "trial period" to delay making the first charge. But if the user cancels during the trial, it'll invalidate the charge token - I expect you won't be able to make the charge.

Also, for those cancelling later in their subscription, you'll probably have trouble getting paid for the last month of the subscription.

The way around those caveats is probably indeed a layer where you store cancellation requests and then send them to Stripe after you've received your last month's payment.

You might also be able to add a so called "hook action": when user cancels, invoice subscription before revoking the charge token. Here, I am not sure if there is something natively built into Stripe, but in that scenario, you're still looking at something beyond the basic trial period feature.

Bytech
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You can use the metered usage pricing model to bill your customer in arrears based on how much of your service they consume and track their usage with the Usage API.

Remember to call the Usage Record API during the billing to record the legal service that you have already provided to your customer, and your customer will be billed at the end of the month based on the usage.

qichuan
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