Proration strategy when the merchant switch to Plan B on the first day of Plan A billing cycle

[Qiangqiang_Zhao]

Question: Subscription Billing Cycle Not Aligning with Documentation
Description:
According to the Shopify documentation on subscription billing, when a merchant upgrades or downgrades their plan, the new billing cycle should retain the currentPeriodEnd of the original plan. However, during my testing, this behavior does not seem to align with the documentation.

The Test Step:

1. The merchant subscribed to the Basic Plan.
2. Approximately 14 hours later, the merchant switched to the Professional Plan.

Expected Behavior:
The currentPeriodEnd should remain the same as the original plan, per the documentation.

Actual Behavior:
A new subscription was created with a different currentPeriodEnd, as shown in the screenshots below:

Questions:

1. Is this behavior expected, or is there a potential issue with the billing implementation?

Looking forward to hearing your insights!

Thank you!

[aciulpan]

Hi, did you ever find an answer? I’m also interested in understanding how to handle this. For me the problem is switching from a paid plan to a free plan and the paid plan is immediately cancelled even though it should still be effective until the next billing cycle

[Qiangqiang_Zhao]

Hi @aciulpan ,I haven’t received a clear reply yet. My current handling method is based on the message notification, the document might not be very accurate. Take my situation as an example, I modified this shop’s subscription from Basic Plan to Professional Plan, then made some resource initialization, use the new billing cycle.

I think the Shopify will not charge for the usage of Basic Plan stage. Perhaps it was because the plan was switched in a short period of time. This needs to wait for verification