# Subscriptions

# Introduction

UNIPaaS offers a flexible and user-friendly Subscription Solution designed to help businesses manage recurring payments effortlessly. Whether you’re running a **SaaS platform or offering memberships**, our subscription tools make it simple to handle recurring revenue while ensuring a seamless experience for your users.

Our Subscription Solution also enable **your users' businesses** that offer ongoing services to easily collect recurring payments, helping to generate revenue and ensure reliable cash flow management.

Subscriptions represent a set of ongoing payments linked to a single plan and payer.

## Benefits

The UNIPaaS Subscription Solution offers a variety of benefits for platforms looking to integrate subscription management. These include:

**Simplified integration:** Easy-to-use APIs and embedded components allow you to set up subscription workflows quickly, freeing up resources to focus on growing your platform.

**Flexible subscription management:** Support for a wide range of subscription scenarios, including custom billing cycles, multiple payment methods, and dynamic pricing, ensures adaptability to your business needs.

**Enhanced user experience:** Provide your users with an intuitive way to manage subscriptions—set up, modify, or cancel plans directly within your platform’s UI.

**Seamless branding:** Fully customizable to match your platform's look and feel, the Subscription Solution creates a consistent and branded experience for your users.

**Reliable performance:** Handle recurring payments with precision, ensuring accurate invoicing and smooth processing, even as your customer base grows.

**Security and Compliance:** Built to meet industry standards for security and compliance, the Subscription Solution protects sensitive payment data and ensures regulatory peace of mind.

## How subscriptions work

**Plans**  and **Subscriptions** are the main objects needed to set up a successful recurring payments agreement between a buyer and a vendor.

The **Plans** object defines a single plan, including its price, billing cycle, and charge amount. While the **Plans** object is active, buyers can subscribe to that plan, creating a **Subscriptions** object.

The **Subscriptions** object represents a specific buyer subscription to a specific plan. It holds the subscription start and end dates, as well as information about the plan. The subscriptions object is linked to both a **Plan** and a buyer. Pausing a subscription will stop the billing cycle from running.

## Subscription features

The following is a list of supported subscription features:

| Feature                | Available options                |
| :--------------------- | :------------------------------- |
| Payment methods        | Credit cards and Direct Debit    |
| Fixed billing cycles   | Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Annually |
| Flexible charge date   |                                  |
| Auto renewal           |                                  |
| Free trial period      |                                  |
| Setup fee              | Configurable amount              |
| Retry logic            |                                  |
| Web-hook notifications | List available below             |

**Flexible charge date**

Coming soon

**Auto Renewal**\
Subscriptions set to renew automatically will do so every time the expiration date is reached.  When a subscription renews, a new subscription object is created with the same configuration. All renewed instances of the same subscription will have the same `identifier` UUID that can be used to track the subscription history.

**Setup Fee**\
Setup fees can be added as an additional cost billed with the first subscription occurrence in a single transaction. The setup fee is defined on the plan level and can only be billed in the same currency as the plan.

**Free Trial**\
Free trial periods allow a subscription to be active for a certain period of time after its creation date without billing the buyer for that period. Trial periods are defined on the plan level, with the period defined by a combination of cycle length (i.e., day, week, month, year) and the number of cycles.

<br />

**Next steps:**

> 📘 [Create Plans and Subscriptions](https://docs.unipaas.com/docs/create-plans-and-subscriptions)

> 📘 [Update Plan](https://docs.unipaas.com/docs/update-plan)

> 📘 [Update Subscription](https://docs.unipaas.com/docs/update-subscription)