If a PayPal subscription is started without a free trial, the first payment is charged as a "setup_fee" instead of a normal recurring payment. To make the second recurring payment on the right date, we add a fake "trial" period to the subscription.

This little trick allows us to charge the first payment right after creating the subscription — and wait for it to go through before letting the user join your members-only channels & groups.

Otherwise, it could take several hours (up to 24 hours) to make the first charge and a subscription could actually start with a failed payment.

Recurring payments are charged at 10:00 AM GMT, irrespective of country.

A PayPal subscription can be canceled in 5 ways:

* Once a PayPal subscription is canceled on the PayPal website (by you or your client), access to your members-only area is immediately revoked.

When a user cancels his subscription in your bot — we actually suspend it and cancel the subscription only at the current period end.

For example, a user started his monthly subscription and paid for the first month on Jan 1. On Jan 15, he canceled it in your bot. In this case, his PayPal subscription will be suspended on Jan 15, and on Feb 1 will be canceled (by InviteMember, automatically). The user will be removed from the channels on Feb 1.

You can temporarily suspend a subscription to pause payment collection.

To do that, log in to your PayPal account, open the subscription page, and change the status to "SUSPENDED". This won't affect the user's membership status in your membership bot.

InviteMember will only remove the user when his subscription status is set to "CANCELLED".

With InviteMember and PayPal, you can customize your grace period (or disable it completely).

PayPal: Failed Recurring Payments And Grace Period

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