Lifecycle

Subscription statuses

Every subscription has a status that tells you where it is in its lifecycle: up to date, retrying a failed payment, paused, or finished.

Statuses at a glance

Status	Meaning	Charges scheduled?
FULFILLED	The subscription is active and up to date. The last payment was successful.	Yes, next renewal
PAST_DUE	A renewal payment failed and the plan's retry settings are retrying it.	Yes, next retry
PAUSED	The subscription has been paused. No payments are charged until it is resumed.	No
CANCELLED	The subscription has ended. Final status.	No
ARCHIVED	The initial payment failed, so the subscription never started. Final status.	No

Lifecycle

The diagram leaves out cancellations triggered by the merchant, the backoffice or a chargeback. They are listed under Cancellation.

How a subscription moves between statuses

Start

A subscription is created when the result of its first (initial) payment is received. There is no status while that payment is in progress.

• If the initial payment is accepted, the subscription is created as FULFILLED.
• If the initial payment fails, the subscription is created as ARCHIVED and is never charged.

Renewals and retries

• Each successful renewal keeps the subscription in FULFILLED.
• If a renewal fails and the plan has retries left, it becomes PAST_DUE.
• If a retry succeeds, it goes back to FULFILLED.
• If a renewal fails and there are no retries left, or the plan has no retry settings, it becomes CANCELLED.
• If the bank returns a hard decline (an error that will not succeed on retry), it becomes CANCELLED straight away, even if retries are left.

Pause and resume

A subscription in FULFILLED or PAST_DUE can be paused. It becomes PAUSED and no payments are charged.

When it is resumed, it goes back to the status it had before the pause. For example, a subscription paused while PAST_DUE is PAST_DUE again after resuming.

Pausing an already paused subscription, or resuming one that is not paused, has no effect.

Cancellation

A subscription becomes CANCELLED for one of these reasons:

Reason	When
END_PLAN	A payment failed and there are no retries left (or the plan has no retries).
HARD_DECLINE	A payment failed with an error that cannot be retried.
MERCHANT_API	The merchant cancelled it through the API.
BACKOFFICE_API	It was cancelled from the backoffice.
DISPUTE	A dispute was received for one of its payments.
CANCELLATION_SETTINGS	The plan's cancellation settings triggered it (for example, after receiving a chargeback).

Final statuses

CANCELLED and ARCHIVED are final. A subscription in a final status:

• is never charged again;
• cannot be paused, resumed, cancelled, updated or moved to another plan.

To continue billing a customer whose subscription is in a final status, create a new subscription.