Subscription Billing

Acquired Billing allows you to automate recurring billing for your customers. Rather than manually initiating each payment, you create a subscription with a product, price, and billing cycle, and Acquired handles the rest — generating bills at the appropriate intervals and processing payments automatically.

How subscription billing works

The key components of a subscription are as follows:

1. Customer: a customer profile containing personal information. Once created, a customer_id is provided which can be added to the Subscription object. See our Customers guide for more.
2. Product and Price Details:
   1. Adding product name and description helps you track what your customers are subscribed to.
   2. Price details include the amount and how often the subscription will bill that amount from the customer, i.e.: the "cycle details'.
3. Payment Method: adding one or more payment methods ensures that a subscription can be activated, and bills will be generated each cycle.

Once active, the subscription automatically generates bills at each billing cycle, and each bill triggers a payment attempt against the customer's stored payment method.

The subscription lifecycle - how to integrate

1. Create a subscription — submit a POST request to Create Subscription with the customer, product, and price details.
2. Activate the subscription — once a payment method is available, the subscription can be activated. Your options for adding a payment method to the subscription are:
   1. Add a previously stored payment method with the Create Subscription request,
   2. Or capture a payment method and add it to a subscription. There are two methods for completing this (whis covered in more detail in the Quick Start guide):
      1. Create your subscription, then add the resulting subscription_id to Components session. When the customer completes payment authorisation successfully, the related subscription will be automatically updated with the payment method.
      2. Capture a payment method yourself and supply it to the subscription via the Activate Subscription request.
3. Bills are generated automatically — once active, a bill is created for each billing cycle based on the price configuration.
4. Payments are processed — at each bill's due date, a payment is automatically attempted against the customer's stored payment method.
   1. Each payment attempt sends a status_update webhook to the subscription's webhook_url, containing the related subscription_id and bill_id. See Bill Payment Webhooks.
   2. If a payment fails, Acquired's Retry Engine can automatically recover it for you. See Recovering subscription payments for how the Retry Engine works.
5. Subscription ends — the subscription is automatically cancelled when the billing cycle limit is reached, or can be cancelled manually at any time. Failed payments may also result in the subscription being cancelled, see the Cancelling subscription after repeated failures guide.

Integration steps

Follow these guides to set up and manage subscriptions, stay on top of bills, and hand over recovery of failed payments to Acquired:

1. Quick Start: Your First Subscription: Create your first subscription end-to-end with the minimum required fields.

2. Components Integration: Use Acquired Components to capture a payment method and activate a subscription in one step.

3. Managing Subscriptions: Learn about subscription statuses, activation, pausing, cancellation, and pricing models.

4. Pricing: Configure fixed or instalment pricing models and billing cycle details.

5. Free Trials: Offer trial periods before the first payment is collected.

6. Bills: Understand how bills are generated, how payment processing works, and how to manage bill statuses.

7. Bill Payment Webhooks: Receive a status_update webhook each time a bill payment is attempted, and reconcile it using the subscription_id and bill_id.

8. Coupons & Discounts: Create coupons and apply them to subscriptions to offer percentage or fixed-amount discounts.

9. Recovering Failed Payments: Enrol a subscription in recovery via the Retry Engine.

10. How to treat subscribers based on the subscription status: Interpret subscription statuses at every stage, to treat your subscribers appropriately.