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It would be great to separate the length of a subscription cycle and the billing cycle.

My wish would be for my customers to sign up for 12 months, but be billed every month so that they don't have to pay one big amount at the beginning of the cycle.

So it would have all the features of the yearly subscription, but they would get a monthly charge and invoice.

Best regards

Arne

Hi Arne

You can certainly set this up by creating a plan that "Bills Every" 1 month with the "No. of Billing Cycles" set to 12. This way the customers will be billed every month for a 12 month period. Note that after 12 months, the subscription will be canceled.

The No. of Billing cycles can be set either while creating the plan or while creating the subscription for that plan.

Is this what you were looking for?

Best,

Vaishnavi

Hi Vaishnavi,

that's not exactly what I am looking for.

The big problem with your solution is, that the subscription will automatically be cancelled after 12 months.

I guess that's something no subscription business really wants ;)

That's why I mentioned I would like everything that the yearly subscription has, just the billing should be monthly.

Best regards

Arne

Hey Arnie

The best bet here would be to create a monthly plan which invoices your customers. The yearly plan has a billing frequency of a year and the entire amount is collected upfront. It has no extra features over the monthly plan in Chargebee.

To make integration to your web application(service) simpler, you can create a monthly plan with a name it in the lines of "Yearly"

Regards
Krishnan

Hi Krishnan,

the problem with your solution is, that the customer can then cancel the subscription by the end of every month.

I want the customer to just be able to cancel his subscription by the end of his yearly subscription cycle.

Do you understand the difference?

You can compare what I want with most of the mobile phone contracts you make (see attached example).

There the subscription has a cycle of 24 months. But if the customer doesn't quit it will automatically start he next cycle of 24 months.

Best regards

Arne

Hello Arne

You can create a monthly plan with an unlimited number of billing cycles. And with the current portal settings, you can restrict customers from canceling their subscription from the customer portal(Settings > Hosted Pages Settings > Customer).  This way they could reach out to you at the end of the yearly subscription if they want to cancel.

However, the option to allow customers to cancel his subscription only by the end of their yearly subscription cycle is currently not available. We do have a feature request in place for this and I'll upvote it on your behalf. We'll notify you once it is taken up.

Regards,

Vaishnavi

Hi Vaishnavi,

how would the credit handling with your solution work?

Our plan is quantity based, so if a customer subscribes for 10 users und downgrades to 8, the 2 will be used as credit for the next cycle.

If I would use a monthly plan for the yearly subscription however, they could cancel before by just setting the quantity to 0 and they would only loose the credit for one month.

Or do you have a solution for that as well?

Can I see the feature request you mentioned somewhere? So I can evaluate if this will ever be build.

My guess would be that you might loose a lot of potential customers by not offering this feature. Most of the big SaaS vendors like Adobe or Salesforce have plans like ours set up.

Best regards

Arne

Hello Arne

Credits for downgrades and upgrades are issued on the basis of Proration. So if a customer downgrades, credits for the unused period would be issued only for the unused period.

For example, if on a monthly plan a customer downgrades from 10 to 8 units during the middle of the month(15th), credits for the 2 units would be issued only for the unused period(15 days). Does this work?

Re the feature requests, we currently track them internally and prioritize them based on the number of requests that come in. We do not have a public forum for it as of now, sorry. Regarding the feature you've requested, I certainly understand that it would add great value to our product. 

However, we're unable to promise an ETA at the moment since our team has their hands full with pre-scheduled tasks lined up for this quarter. However, we'll ensure we keep you posted when it's taken up.

Thumbs up for this Feature. 

I have the same business case and worked around it with your proposals, but thats not the best solution i think. 

So please upvote the request ;)

Same need here!

Thanks for your feedback, Andreas.

I've upvoted the feature on your behalf. We'll let you know when it's taken up.

Same issue on or side.

We would like to bill monthly but with an annual commitment. We don't use the customer portal as we deal almost everything offline. Workaround solutions you provide are not ideal since we lose the anniversary date so we don't know wether the customer is legit to request for a cancellation or not.

Please, upvote for that important feature for a subscription billing software.

Thanks for your feedback, Jordan.

I've added another upvote to step up the priority and tagged the forum conversation internally, to track the progress. We'll let you know when it's taken up. 

This feature is actually a make or break for us. Customers sign annual contracts but often pay monthly or quarterly. Putting them into Chargebee as a monthly or quarterly rate plan makes it look like they're up for renewal every month or quarter, which is not reflective of the actual situation and renders the renewal reports totally useless.

It would be greatly appreciated if this was bumped up on the priority list!

Any updates on this? Still needed?