Offer free trials to your customers

Offering trials for your service is a great way to make your customers able to test your service before buying it. ProcessOut makes it easy to provide trial periods when using subscriptions.

How trial periods work

A trial period on a Subscription ↗ is defined by a date at which the trial period will end. This field is the attribute trial_end_at of a subscription, and can be null if you don’t want to allow any trial period for a given subscription.

Behind the hood, ProcessOut’s workers will pull any transaction with a trial date that is set in the past and set this field to null. Any subscription with a subscription’s attribute trial_end_at containing a date is therefore considered as being in trial. Customers do not get charged when a subscription is still in its trial period.

Additionnaly, when a subscription trial period gets to an end, the iterate_at attribute of the subscription gets set to the current time to effectively start the next iteration immediately.

Apply a trial to a subscription

Trials can be applied at any given time in a subscription life-cycle. However, if applied when the subscription is active, the current subscription period will be overwritten, meaning that the iterate_at date set on the subscription will be ignored and reset when the trial gets to an end.

cURL Python Ruby PHP Go Node.js

curl -X PUT https://api.processout.com/subscriptions/sub_SSpcwpKNSa2WT2pixBRNyOnCrftmJeqR \
    -u test-proj_gAO1Uu0ysZJvDuUpOGPkUBeE3pGalk3x:key_sandbox_mah31RDFqcDxmaS7MvhDbJfDJvjtsFTB \
    -d trial_end_at="2022-10-02T15:00:00Z"

var ProcessOut = require("processout");
var client = new ProcessOut(
    "test-proj_gAO1Uu0ysZJvDuUpOGPkUBeE3pGalk3x",
    "key_sandbox_mah31RDFqcDxmaS7MvhDbJfDJvjtsFTB");

client.newSubscription().find("sub_SSpcwpKNSa2WT2pixBRNyOnCrftmJeqR").then(
    function(subscription) {
        subscription.setTrialEndAt("2022-10-02T15:00:00Z");
        subscription.save().then(function(subscription) {
            // The trial was correctly set on the subscription

        }, function(err) {
            // An error occured
        });

    }, function(err) {
        // Could not find the subscription
    });

import processout
client = processout.ProcessOut(
    "test-proj_gAO1Uu0ysZJvDuUpOGPkUBeE3pGalk3x", 
    "key_sandbox_mah31RDFqcDxmaS7MvhDbJfDJvjtsFTB")

subscription = client.new_subscription().find("sub_SSpcwpKNSa2WT2pixBRNyOnCrftmJeqR")
subscription.trial_end_at = "2022-10-02T15:00:00Z"
subscription.save()

# The trial was correctly set on the subscription

require "processout"
client = ProcessOut::Client.new(
    "test-proj_gAO1Uu0ysZJvDuUpOGPkUBeE3pGalk3x", 
    "key_sandbox_mah31RDFqcDxmaS7MvhDbJfDJvjtsFTB")

subscription = client.subscription.find("sub_SSpcwpKNSa2WT2pixBRNyOnCrftmJeqR")
subscription.trial_end_at = "2022-10-02T15:00:00Z"
subscription.save

# The trial was correctly set on the subscription

<?php
$client = new \ProcessOut\ProcessOut(
    "test-proj_gAO1Uu0ysZJvDuUpOGPkUBeE3pGalk3x", 
    "key_sandbox_mah31RDFqcDxmaS7MvhDbJfDJvjtsFTB");

$subscription = $client->newSubscription()->find("sub_SSpcwpKNSa2WT2pixBRNyOnCrftmJeqR");
$subscription->setTrialEndAt("2022-10-02T15:00:00Z");
$subscription->save();

// The trial was correctly set on the subscription

import "github.com/processout/processout-go"

var client = processout.New(
    "test-proj_gAO1Uu0ysZJvDuUpOGPkUBeE3pGalk3x", 
    "key_sandbox_mah31RDFqcDxmaS7MvhDbJfDJvjtsFTB",
)

sub, _ := client.NewSubscription().Find("sub_SSpcwpKNSa2WT2pixBRNyOnCrftmJeqR")
sub.TrialEndAt = processout.Time(time.Now())
sub, err = sub.Save()
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}

// The trial was correctly set on the subscription