How The First Payment Is Charged
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.
When Recurring Payments Are Charged
Recurring payments are charged at 10:00 AM GMT, irrespective of country.
How To Cancel A PayPal Subscription
A PayPal subscription can be canceled in 5 ways:
by the user in your membership bot ("Cancel subscription" button);
by yourself in the InviteMember bot (PayPal > "Cancel subscription" button);
by the user on the PayPal website *;
by you on the PayPal website *;
automatically (due to the failed payments).
* 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.
How To Suspend A PayPal Subscription
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".
What Happens When a User Pauses Their Recurring Subscription
When a PayPal subscription is canceled by the end user in the membership bot, here’s what happens to keep their access until the end of the paid billing period:
1. We change the subscription status to SUSPENDED and put the following reason in a comment: "User cancelled his subscription via membership bot. Subscription was suspended and will be cancelled automatically at period end"
2. We schedule a task to cancel the subscription at the end of the billing period.
3. When the billing period finishes and the task is executed, we finally CANCEL the SUSPENDED subscription. We put the following reason in a comment: “Cancelled by user via membership bot in Telegram."
Failed Payments Retry And Grace Period
With InviteMember and PayPal, you can customize your grace period (or disable it completely).