Quick start

This page introduces subscriptions and explains how to set up recurring billing for your customers.

The idea behind the subscription system is simple: we take care of all payment handling and subscriber communication on your behalf. This includes scheduling, upgrades, downgrades, and collecting updated payment details from subscribers when needed.

Your system only needs to respond to subscription state changes. When a subscription is activated, paused or terminated, we notify your system via webhooks. Based on these webhook updates, your system should enable, suspend or cancel the service. Everything else is handled by us.

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For technical details, see the API Reference. It links the relevant operations directly with the Web Service API Client, allowing you to test and send requests directly from your browser.

Set up recurring billing in four steps

Recurring billing is a common business model and can be set up on our platform in just a few steps:

1. Create a charge flow

   to collect payment information from your subscribers. See Charge Flows.

2. Define a product and product version

   specifying how much should be billed and when. See Products.

3. Create a subscriber

   the object representing your customer. See Subscribers.

4. Subscribe the subscriber

   to the product you created. See Subscriptions.

Once you have set up a product, you only need to repeat steps 3 and 4 for every new customer.

Charge flows vs. subscriptions

There are two approaches to billing customers on a recurring basis:

• Charge flows — payment is triggered and controlled by the merchant.
• Subscriptions — billing and subscriber management are handled automatically by the platform.

Charge flows

When you apply a charge flow to a transaction object, payment data is collected according to the charge flow settings in your space.

• If a customer already has a valid token, it will be charged directly.
• Charge flows must be triggered and scheduled by you (the merchant).
• This approach is useful when you need control over the timing of charges, for example when selling physical products and needing to check inventory first.
• Charge flows also handle payment failures and automatically collect missing or incorrect payment details from customers, based on your configuration.

For more details, see Charge Flows.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions are the preferred method when you want the entire process automated by the platform.

• You configure the billing cycle and pricing in the product settings.
• The platform automatically manages payment collection and charges.
• Subscriptions also handle subscriber management, product versions and price calculations — on top of using charge flows to process payments.

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Since subscriptions rely on charge flows, you must first activate the charge flow feature and configure at least one charge flow in your space.

Example used throughout this documentation

To illustrate the setup, we use one example subscription product on the following pages.

Example: payment product

• Setup fee: 249 EUR (one-time)
• Period fee: 15 EUR / month for basic payment services
• Transaction fees: 0.10 EUR for the first 1,000 transactions per month, with reduced pricing after that
• Optional add-ons:
  • Integration service — product installed in the merchant's environment
  • Support SLA — access to specific support hours

This example is referenced on the following pages when we cover product versions, components and component groups.

Need help?

If you need assistance after reading this guide, explore the rest of our documentation or get in touch with us for help configuring subscriptions.