Subscriptions & renewals

A subscription is a product priced per cycle rather than once: monthly coaching, a recurring program fee, any ongoing service. Protocol keeps the cycle for you, moving the client’s access forward period by period and producing an invoice each time.

One thing to be clear about before you set one up: a renewal does not charge anybody. Protocol does not collect money on any product. Each cycle’s payment is yours to take and yours to record.

Create a subscription product

In Shop → Products, create a product, set its pricing type to subscription, and choose:

• Billing interval and count, how long a cycle lasts: every 1 month, every 3 months, every 1 year, and so on.
• Price, the amount for one cycle.

Then record the sale against the client as a purchase, the same way you record any other. Once the purchase is active it has a current period, and the cycle starts running.

A subscription cannot also be sold as an installment plan. Installments split a single one-time price into dated payments; a subscription already repeats.

What a renewal does

When a purchase reaches the end of its current period, Protocol renews it in the background. That means:

• The period moves forward by one interval, anchored so no paid time is lost.
• Session credits reset to the full amount, if it is a session-based product.
• Access is extended, for a product with time-limited access.
• A new invoice is added to the purchase for the new period.

A monthly subscription that started on the 12th moves to the 12th of the following month. You can also renew a subscription by hand from the purchase, which is the override when a cycle needs correcting or the price for the next period has changed.

What a renewal does not do

It does not take money. No card is charged, nothing is requested from the client, and nothing is sent to Stripe.

The invoice a renewal produces is recorded as paid, because it is written as the record of the cycle rather than as a request for payment. So treat it as “this period happened”, not as proof that the money arrived. Collecting each cycle is a thing you do outside Protocol, on your own schedule.

If a client stops paying, nothing stops on its own. The renewal keeps rolling the period forward until you cancel or pause the purchase yourself.

Subscriptions that came in from an app store are left alone by this, because the store owns their cycle rather than Protocol.

Ending one

There is no scheduled cancellation. Cancelling takes effect when you do it: the purchase stops renewing, and the client stops holding it straight away.

So if you want a client to keep the rest of a period they have already paid for, leave the purchase active and cancel it on the day the period ends. If the break is meant to be temporary, pause it instead: pausing holds access, keeps the purchase, and shifts the dates forward by the time it spent paused, so nobody loses the days they were away.

Neither one refunds anything. What each action does to access and to money, side by side, is in Refunds, cancellations and what moves the money.

If a former subscriber comes back, record a new purchase; they start a fresh cycle.

What the client sees

In their app the client sees the purchase in their history with its invoices, and keeps whatever the product grants for as long as the subscription is active.

Invoices

Every period, the first and each renewal alike, leaves an invoice on the purchase. Open the purchase from Shop → Purchases to read the whole billing history, print an invoice, or send one to the client. See Purchases & invoices.