ThriveCart’s Recurring Subscription tools make it easy to build reliable, predictable income by offering ongoing access as either ongoing or limited subscriptions to your products or services. Whether you sell memberships, digital content, or physical goods, recurring billing helps you create payment plans that encourage customer retention and long-term growth, turning one-time buyers into loyal, repeat customers.
This subscription setup guide will walk you through how to create payment plans, and all the settings that ThriveCart’s recurring subscriptions offer you. To get started, you need to head to the Product tab followed by the Pricing tab.
Currency – You will choose what currency you wish to charge your customers in for this product.
Next, we need to add our pricing option(s). We’re looking at creating a subscription product, so we’ll click the Set product price button, which will open a modal window where we can select our payment type of subscription (ongoing), subscription (limited), or Split-pay option.
- The Subscription (ongoing) option would be for subscriptions that do not have an end date. These will continue charging your customers until the subscription is canceled.
- The Subscription (limited) option would be for subscriptions for a set number of rebills. These will charge at least one rebill after the initial payment, and by default, the number of rebills is set to 1, but you can enter the total number of rebills you wish to charge the customer. This is in addition to the initial today charge, so if you’re wanting the customer to be charged a total of 6 times, then you would want to set the number of rebills to 5.
- The Split Pay option is similar to a limited subscription, but with fewer settings to choose from for a quicker and easier setup. Split pay is available for 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 payments and the amounts will all be the same as the initial payment. If you’re wanting additional functionality or customization, set a limited subscription for customizable numbers of recurring payments and the ability to set a trial. See more on setting up Split Pay in this guide.
Creating a Subscription
Regardless of whether you’ve chosen an ongoing or limited subscription, you’ll be able to set the below options as well:
- Billing frequency – this is how often your customers will be rebilled. From this drop-down, you have the options of daily, weekly, 2-weekly, monthly, quarterly, 6-monthly, or annually.
- Subscription price – This is the amount we wish to charge our customers on each rebill. So in the example above the customer would be charged 37 (of the previously selected currency) every month.
- Today’s price – in this field we want to enter the amount we want to charge our customer when they checkout. You can enter anything you’d like. If you want to charge your customer nothing on their first day (such as for a free trial) you can. Or you can offer a reduced first payment, charge them exactly the same as your recurring payments, or even charge them a higher up-front payment. The choice is completely yours.
- Trial period – If you’re wanting to offer a free trial, you’ll want to set the today’s price field to $0.00, but the trial field is where you can set how long the trial will last. To offer a paid trial, you can enter an amount in the today’s price field, but you can see more details on offering trials in this guide.
You can also have ThriveCart send out a recurring invoice for each payment the customer makes. Simply check the ‘Send on recurring payment‘ box.
Remember at the bottom of the payment details will be a complete summary of exactly what the customer will be charged, how often they will be charged and a total amount if applicable.
You can also set a quantity limit for this payment option. So if you only want to offer a limited number of people the chance to pay via this payment plan, you can set this up here too.
When clicking “Next”, the next screen will let you name your pricing option. This will show on the checkout page when there are multiple pricing options, and also on your invoice and transactions area.
Once your subscription payment settings are saved, you’ll then have this shown and you can edit/delete it, or even add additional payment options to your cart.
Set Billing date (monthly subscriptions) BETA
When your billing frequency is set to Monthly and no trial period is set, you’ll see a Billing date field with two options:
Charge Immediately (selected by default) — the customer is charged on their purchase date and every month thereafter. This matches the existing behavior and is automatically applied to all new and existing subscriptions.
Anchored date — the customer is always billed on a specific day of the calendar month (for example, always on the 4th), regardless of when they originally purchased.
When you select Anchored date, a day picker appears allowing you to choose any day from 1 to 28. You can also choose whether the gap between the purchase date and the first billing date is treated as a free period or prorated, where you can charge for days used before the billing cycle started, giving you full control over how that first partial billing cycle is handled.
Note: The Billing date field is hidden when a trial period is configured, since the trial already controls the delay to the first charge. Anchored billing is available for monthly subscriptions only (ongoing and limited).
Note on months with less than 31 days: If assigning 29, 30, or 31 as your anchored date, billing will always process on the last day of the calendar month, if that specific month does not have that number of days.
For example, setting an anchored date of the 31st will bill on February 28 (or 29 in a Leap Year), April 30, June 30, September 30, and November 30.
Identifying Anchored Billing Products/Transactions:
Your product list will show an “Anchored Billing” pill to easily identify which products have been setup with a specific bill date: 
Looking to set a Subscription or Split-Pay payment method to be available to only specific countries? You can now set this within your pricing option settings. See more in this guide.
Example Payment Plan Use Cases
Example 1 – Set a different startup cost
- Choose the payment type as Subscription (limited)
- Set your billing frequency to Every 2 weeks
- Set the every 2 weeks price to those recurring payment amounts ($100)
- Set Today’s price (your startup cost) as $200.00
- Detail the number of rebills (3)
You can then see that your customer will be charged $200 upfront, and then $100 three times, bi-weekly for a total of $500.
Example 2 – Collect a deposit & set a Paid Trial
If you’re wanting to collect a deposit upfront and then start monthly payments after a certain time period, you can do this with the subscription (limited) pricing option as well.
- Choose the Subscription (limited) payment type
- Set the billing frequency to Monthly
- Set the Monthly price to $199.00
- Set today’s price as $100 for your deposit
- Set a trial period of 7 days
- Set the number of rebills to 4
You’ll see in the summary that your customer will be charged $100 immediately, and then after their 7-day trial their monthly payments of $199 will start and run for 4 months, for a total price of $896.00.
Remember, when clicking “Next” when setting your pricing option, you’ll be able to set the product name your customer will see in checkout – where you can add a custom name based on your offer.
Consider ThrivePay Installments
Instead of worrying about chasing customers down to complete their split pay or limited subscription payments, consider utilizing ThrivePay Installments for your split payments.
Unlike traditional Split Pay, with ThrivePay Installments you receive the full payout upfront, minus applicable fees.
Eligible customers can split a one-time purchase into 3, 6, or 12 interest-free monthly payments, with no traditional credit check, making it easier for them to opt-in and choose their payment plan length. It is especially useful for high-ticket products where affordability may prevent a purchase. Learn more in What is ThrivePay Installments?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Q: Can I set a subscription purchase to replace a previous subscription purchase?
- A: You can! From the pricing screen, you can now choose products that if a customer purchases the product you’re editing, it would replace (and pro-rate) the purchase of the previous product. This is a great option if you’re wanting an annual subscription to replace monthly, as just one example. See more here.
- Q: Will I be able to manage recurring billing for USA and international subscriptions?
- A: Within ThriveCart, you can cancel and pause subscriptions regardless of where the customer purchased or the currency that they paid in.
- Q: Can I set a minimum subscription length?
- A: Recent regulations require the ability to allow customer’s to be able to cancel their subscription at any time, and so it’s not currently possible to disable subscription cancellation across the board. However, Pro+ users can disable for countries outside of the EU – see more here.
- Q: Can I set a different price for the first three months, and then the subscription amount changes?
- A: No, it’s not currently possible to change the subscription pricing within the ThriveCart dashboard and subscriptions can only be set up with a different initial (today) price and all recurring payments will be the same.
- Q: How can customers cancel their subscriptions?
- A: Customers can cancel their subscriptions directly in the Customer Hub.