How to track currentPeriodEnd on renewals or uninstall?

Partner Discussions
1

Hi Shopify team,

We’d appreciate clarification around how to correctly track currentPeriodEnd for active subscriptions over time.

We currently:

  • Store the currentPeriodEnd returned after a subscription is approved (via appSubscriptionCreate)
  • Save that value to our DB to manage access after uninstall or downgrade

The issue is that subscriptions can renew monthly or yearly, but we’re not sure if (in test or real charges):

  • Shopify does send a webhook (app_subscriptions/update) after each renewal ?
  • The currentPeriodEnd field moves forward silently?
  • If the merchant uninstalls the app months later and we didn’t fetch it again, we have no way of knowing how long they were charged for

Our goal is to let merchants keep access until their paid period ends, even if they uninstall or downgrade mid-cycle.

So:

➤ What’s the recommended way to keep currentPeriodEnd up to date over time?

  • Is polling appInstallation → activeSubscriptions → currentPeriodEnd the only option, every day?
  • Does Shopify plan to send a webhook on automatic renewals?
  • Is there a best practice to handle this (e.g. via GraphQL or scheduled jobs)?

Like we know that currentPeriodEnd will be null if subscription is canceled… so it’s not possible to query with GraphQL inside the canceled webhook “app_subscriptions_update”, it will already be null…

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

—

Chris
Movo Labs

1 Like
2

Hey Chris!

I believe I’ve covered this in my reply here, so I’m going to solve this thread: Subscription Behavior After Re-installation & Trial → Paid Transition

If anything is missing though, reply to me on that other thread and we can dig in further!