Subscriptions

As an alternative to one-off payments, Moonbase supports subscriptions for your products with recurring payments. This is done by selecting “Recurring” as the recurrence for payments on one of the Price Variations of your product or bundle:

Once selected, your price variation will have a couple of new fields for you to tweak:

• Cycle length: This determines the interval between each payment on subscriptions, and can be either monthly or yearly.

• License grace period: This determines how long product licenses are valid for after a payment on a subscription fails. It also impacts how long we perform dunning on the subscription.

• Renewal price: In addition to setting a price per cycle of the subscription, you may also choose to use another price for any further renewals of the subscription.

You also have the option to add milestones to subscriptions started with this variation.

Milestones

To be able to reward customers for subscribing to your products, you may set up milestones on subscriptions. Each milestone added will be granted after a certain number of payments, can issue a reward to customers, either:

• Coupon code: Generate a unique code for a coupon you’ve set up and send to the customer.

• Perpetual license conversion: Convert licenses on the subscription to perpetual licenses.

You also have the option to keep the milestones repeating indefinitely, so long as the subscription is active, or to end the subscription once the last milestone is reached.

A popular use-case for milestones is to support a “Rent-to-Own” offer, where customers eventually get lifetime access to a product after having subscribed for a certain period of time. This is done by having a single milestones which converts licenses into perpetual licenses and end the subscription. Customers will see the progress as they stay subscribed, and will be notified about any milestones granted along the way.

Bundle subscriptions

Like most of the pricing tools we have in Moonbase, subscriptions also works for selling bundles. Whenever customers start a subscription to a bundle, they receive licenses for all products within the bundle, attached to the bundle subscription itself. Like with one-off perpetual sales, partial bundle purchases also works when starting subscriptions, allowing customers to get a reduced price for a smaller bundle.

Over time you may change the bundle however, and it’s important to consider existing subscriber when you make these changes. When you add products or change the price, existing subscriptions are never impacted. You have to do this explicitly through subscription upgrades. These upgrades can be performed on individual subscriptions, but you can also initiate upgrades for all subscriptions for a given bundle:

You have the option of what you want to change for existing subscriptions, you can opt to only upgrade products/content or price, or do both:

Each customer with an impacted and active subscription will be notified by email of the change to their subscription.

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