Change subscriptions

Learn how to change existing subscriptions.

Stripe supports changing existing subscriptions without having to cancel and recreate them. Some of the most significant changes you might make are:

Changing the billing cycle
Upgrading or downgrading the subscription price
Canceling or pausing an active subscription

Some changes automatically create a new invoice. Use the pending updates feature with these changes so that the updates are only applied if the new invoice is successfully paid.

You can also alter subscriptions by updating the parameters normally used when creating the subscription. For example:

Applying discounts
Using trial periods
Setting quantities
Adding taxes

The most complex aspect of changing existing subscriptions is proration, where the customer is charged a percentage of a subscription’s cost to reflect partial use. By default, the following actions result in a proration:

Changing to a price with a different base cost
Changing to a price with a different billing interval
Adding a trial period to an active subscription
Changing the quantity

Proration ensures that customers are billed accurately, but a proration can result in different payment amounts than you expect, which may be confusing. Also keep in mind that prorations are never automatically refunded to a customer nor immediately billed, although you can do both manually. When applying changes to existing subscriptions, discounts don’t affect the resulting proration line items.

Prorations only apply to charges that occur ahead of the billing cycle. Metered billing is not subject to proration.

You can preview a proration to view the amount before applying the changes.