Free trial before a recurring payment

At the moment, we don't have a single endpoint or a feature on the Dashboard for a free trial period of a subscription or recurring payment. However, it's possible to implement this from your end using tokenization.

To run a trial version of a subscription service, you can follow these simple steps:

1. Tokenize the card: You'd need to tokenize the card first by charging the user a tiny amount. Please take a look at how to tokenize a card here.

2. Verify the transaction: When you verify the transaction, it returns, amongst other things, a customer code and an authorization code.

3. Subscribe the customer to the plan after the trial period.

By now, you should have created a Subscription Plan to which you'll subscribe the customer. Whenever you're ready to start billing the customer for that plan, call the "create subscription" endpoints, pass the customer code, the authorization token, and the plan code, and your customer will be subscribed.

Important to note

Please be sure to notify the customer in advance that they'll be charged to tokenize the payment card. You can also refund this amount once the transaction is successful.

If you encounter any issues while implementing this workaround, please reach out to us at techsupport@paystack.com or via our contact form.