Stripe: How can I create a non-renewable subscription plan?

Question

We would like to have a yearly plan for our service, but legally we cannot automatically-renew our customer's yearly plan. We need to communicate with our customers in a timely manner within the weeks leading up to the end of their yearly plan so that they will manually purchase another year. (this is a legal thing). So we need some method of setting up a Stripe subscription plan that will either not auto-renew, or that we can cancel via API when we're informed via a webhook that their subscription's year is about to end.

Has anyone had any luck with any creative ways of setting up a non-renewable yearly subscription plan with Stripe? Trying to avoid needing to setup a cron job that hits Stripe everyday to find subscriptions that need to be cancelled.

After contacting Stripe support, there's not an "official" way to do so.

One thought I had was to setup a custom subscription plan of 10 days with a 355 day trial period. That way I could set a webhook to trigger based on the customer.subscription.trial_will_end event.

I'm doing this with the node.js Stripe module.

Answer 1

Well, you could set up a $0.00 subscription, and then a listener for invoice.created webhook, and use that to trigger a flow where you inform the user that their invoice is due, and direct them to a page where they can 'approve' the payment. When they approve it, you could then just create a good old fashioned Charge to collect the money.

Basically, use Stripe as your cron job, and do the actual Charge creation separately.