I think this is a bug. It wasn’t clear to me.
I recently discovered the “show subscription details” feature. Started running tests on it. I have several accounts subscribed to my own service to test these features.
There’s always been a potential issue where customers are shown their base billing price in Stripe and don’t see the impact of any coupons applied to the account. That may be the topic for a different report. Maybe Stripe makes it impossible to see coupons. I need to do some tests with that. The solution has been to simply modify the base price for a customer in Stripe. That leads to the customer seeing the right price on their account portal and the admin view showing the right price in their profile.
However, things were strange with “show subscription details”.
I tested turning it on and went to an account that I keep on a prolonged free trial for testing.
The subscription details part of the newsletter said:
In case the image doesn’t load:
“You are receiving this because you are a trialing subscriber to The REIT Forum. Your free trial ends on 18 March 2025, at which time you will be charged the regular price. You can always cancel before then.”
So why is that an issue?
- The account has a 100% off coupon applied in Stripe. That coupon is never shown on the account portal, so I thought maybe the issue was using the coupon.
- I tested resetting the base price from the regular price ($49/month) to $29/month. The admin view and the account portal view immediately updated. However, the subsequent email had the same exact text.
The account should have a price of $29/month with a perpetual 100% discount leading to an actual rate of $0/month. However, the email simply says the customer “will be charged the regular price.”
I am concerned that this might lead to confusion for customers who have been given a grandfathered rate. If we could list the actual rate in the email, that would be great. If not, we could tell them to check the account portal. But the current implementation could lead members with coupons / special offers / grandfathered rates from other platforms to believe their discount disappeared.
Here’s a screenshot showing the price for the account from admin view and the subscription in Stripe:
I waited about 25 minutes before sending my final test email and confirmed that there was no change. The ability to inform readers about their dates is great, so I’m considering turning the feature on and using the email footer to explain it.
Other suggestion: It would nice if the email footer didn’t include a reminder that the customer “can always cancel before then.” Of course they can, but we don’t really want to suggest it to them.
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Changing it to “your payment method will be charged” would cover the case of discounted plans.
A 100% discount feels like a bit of an edge case - is there a reason to set it up this way rather than to make their account have complimentary access?
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It would be, but I really don’t believe the issue is related to the 100% discount. I think the wording is automatic. I just haven’t tested the email feature for subscription details with one of my accounts that uses a smaller discount AND is set to trial. I can run a separate test on that, but I have no reason to think the wording will change.
The wording didn’t change when I modified the base price, so it seems unlikely that it would consider coupons when the admin view and account portal don’t notice coupons applied to the membership.
I hope that’s clear. If needed I’ll modify the percent and send another test email.
I’ve confirmed that the bug occurs with trial accounts regardless of how their price has been modified. I’ve performed additional tests.
Additional test 1: I modified the account to use the regular $49/month price combined with a 40% off coupon.
Result: “you will be charged the regular price.”
Additional test 2: I removed the coupon and modified the customer price to $22.00 per month.
Result: “you will be charged the regular price.”
Here is a screenshot demonstrating the customer status in stripe prior to sending the test emails and the resulting text received by the customer account:
Possible fixes:
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Best scenario: Have the program check the customer future invoice in Stripe and retrieve the upcoming amount. This would reflect any coupons and in theory should be near 100% accuracy since Stripe should know how much Stripe is going to charge.
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Viable scenario: Pull the customer rate from the account portal. This isn’t perfect because the account portal doesn’t recognize coupons, but the website owner can still modify the price in Stripe instead of using coupons.
In either scenario, it would be nice if the website owner can also toggle off the text for “you can always cancel before then”.
I only bring up this bug because I love the idea of including this information in emails to customers. It’s great for transparency, which can enhance the customer experience.
My suggestion was that maybe if it said “your payment method will be charged” (instead of the ‘regular price’ language), that’d fix the case where a member is getting a discounted (but not $0) subscription. That would be a small fix to the wording. The bigger fix - getting all the info from Stripe into Ghost and then to Mailgun - well, it’s bigger. I thought maybe the smaller fix would be a good stopgap that covered most of the cases.
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Yeah, I think that would work. Good change. We could always tell people to visit the site for details using the footer if we wanted. Your language prevents any potentially inaccurate information.
Hope Ghost will adopt that as a very quick fix. I can’t imagine anyone being negatively impacted by that method. Good solution.
Not sure if I should mark it as a solution in the chain before Ghost implements it. But that’s the simple fix.
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