As your users' needs evolve, so too might their subscription plans. Your application needs to gracefully handle updates to existing subscriptions, whether that's upgrading to a higher tier, downgrading, or changing billing intervals. Similarly, providing a clear and easy path for cancellations is crucial for customer satisfaction and retention.
Stripe provides robust APIs for managing subscription lifecycle events. We'll explore how to implement these functionalities in your Next.js application, ensuring a seamless experience for your customers.
When a user decides to change their subscription, you'll typically interact with the Stripe subscriptions API. The primary operation here is updating an existing subscription. You can modify fields like items (to change the price/plan), quantity, and proration_behavior.
The proration_behavior parameter is key to how Stripe handles immediate changes. Options include:
create_prorations: Stripe will create a prorated charge or credit immediately for the change. This is often the default and most common approach for upgrades.
none: Stripe will not create any prorations. The change will take effect at the next billing period.
Here's a conceptual example of how you might update a subscription on your backend:
import Stripe from 'stripe';
const stripe = new Stripe(process.env.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, {
apiVersion: '2022-11-15',
});
export async function POST(request) {
const { subscriptionId, newPriceId, currentQuantity } = await request.json();
try {
const subscription = await stripe.subscriptions.update(subscriptionId, {
items: [
{
id: subscriptionId, // If you're changing the price of an existing item
price: newPriceId,
quantity: currentQuantity,
},
],
proration_behavior: 'create_prorations',
});
return new Response(JSON.stringify({ subscription }), {
status: 200,
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
},
});
} catch (error) {
console.error('Error updating subscription:', error);
return new Response(JSON.stringify({ error: error.message }), {
status: 500,
headers: {
'Content-Type': 'application/json',
},
});
}
}