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 billing works

A subscription ties together a customer, a product, a price, and one or more payment methods. 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 is as follows:

1. Create a subscription — submit a POST request to the /subscriptions endpoint with the customer, product, and price details.
2. Activate the subscription — if the subscription was created without a payment method, activate it by supplying payment methods via the /subscriptions/{subscription_id}/activate endpoint.
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.
5. Subscription ends — the subscription is automatically cancelled when the billing cycle limit is reached, or can be cancelled manually via the API at any time.

Integration journey

Follow these guides to set up and manage subscriptions:

1. Quick Start: Your First Subscription

   • Create your first subscription end-to-end with the minimum required fields.

2. Managing Subscriptions

   • Learn about subscription statuses, activation, pausing, cancellation, and pricing models.

3. Pricing

   • Configure fixed or variable pricing models and billing cycle details.

4. Free Trials

   • Offer trial periods before the first payment is collected.

5. Bills

   • Understand how bills are generated, how payment processing works, and how to manage bill statuses.