Charge replacement only when previous charge's trial ends

Retired Boards Appdev Graphql Basics And Troubleshooting

Topic summary

A developer is seeking a way to offer existing paying subscribers a trial period for a higher-tier plan without immediately canceling their current subscription.

Current Challenge:

  • Shopify’s subscription system only allows one active subscription at a time
  • When a new subscription starts, the previous one is automatically cancelled
  • The AppSubscriptionReplacementBehavior enum doesn’t appear to support delaying cancellation until a trial period ends

Desired Behavior:
The developer wants users to:

  • Continue paying for their existing plan during the trial period
  • Only start paying the new amount (and cancel the old subscription) after the trial ends

Status: The discussion remains open with no solution provided yet. Shopify Dev Support referenced documentation on upgrading/downgrading app subscriptions but didn’t address the specific trial period requirement.

Summarized with AI on November 20. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

Hi

It is possible to use AppSubscriptionReplacementBehavior or any other method to cancel the replaced charge only when the trial for the new charge ends?

Thanks for any help!

2

Can anyone help here? Thanks!

3

Hi @elad_beprofit ,

Thanks for your post. Only one subscription can be active at a time - when a new one starts the previously active one is cancelled. Some documentation that might be helpful is here:

https://shopify.dev/docs/apps/billing/subscriptions#upgrading-and-downgrading-apps

Hope you have a great day

2 Likes
4

Hi @ShopifyDevSup

Thanks for replaying. Can you suggest a way we can offer an existing paying user a trial period of a higher plan - so he won’t be paying the new amount until trial is over but will continue paying for the existing plan until trial is over.