Keep your course access fully aligned with your subscription billing with ThriveCart Learn subscription access. When a customer’s recurring payment fails or they cancel their plan, you can control exactly what happens next with flexible failed payment course access settings. Choose to pause drip content on failed payment or retain course access until end of billing period on cancellation, ensuring a smooth experience for both you and your students.
These smart automation options help you maintain control, reduce confusion, and deliver a consistent learning journey tied directly to each subscriber’s active status.
To set up how subscriptions are handled when your student’s billing fails, navigate to the Course Options screen within your specific course:
At ‘If a subscription payment to access this course fails’ there are two options that you can select from if a users/student’s subscription payment to access one of your course fails:
- Pause dripping until payment is made
- Disable all access until payment is made
Pause dripping until payment is made
This prevents new content from being released until their subscription payment has been made. For example, if you have content set to drip out on a rebill payment or after a specific period of time; this will be paused until payments resume. This ensures that you can pause drip content on failed payments, so that customers with failed rebills do not continue to get access to new content until their payment has been processed successfully.
Disable all access until payment is made
This failed payment course access setting will disable your users access completely when a subscription payment fails, and until their subscription payment has been made. Once received, they’ll then be able to access the course content again.
The above functionality is a core Learn feature so that you can manage what happens when a customer’s recurring payment fails, and how that affects access to your course content while awaiting a successful payment.
Keep access until the end of a customer’s subscription period
With ThriveCart Learn and Pro+, you can easily manage course access after cancellation, giving you full control over whether students lose access to content immediately, or finish out their billing period—all based on your preferred subscription settings.
This feature is included with a ThriveCart Pro+ license, and requires Learn+ for it to be enabled, and the product needs Stripe Connect+ to be enabled at the time of cancellation.
- If disabled; access to this course is revoked immediately upon subscription cancellation
- If enabled; subscriptions will retain access until the end of their billing period
Regarding the Stripe Connect+ Requirement:
If a customer bought Product A on 1st March via Stripe Legacy and was granted access to this course, then you updated Product A to Connect+ in June and the customer cancelled in July, their access would be retained until the end of their billing period. If the product was still set to use Stripe Legacy at the time of cancellation, their access would be revoked immediately.
Essentially, the customer’s subscription can be managed through any processor, but the product needs to have Connect+ enabled at the time of their cancellation in order to retain course access until the end of their billing cycle.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Q: Can I set failed payment settings if I’m not on Pro+, Learn+, or Connect+?
- A: Yes, the settings related to failed recurring payments are available on our core Learn plan, and these options are not tied to a plan level or payment processor.
- A: Yes, the settings related to failed recurring payments are available on our core Learn plan, and these options are not tied to a plan level or payment processor.
- Q: Can I keep access until the end of a billing cycle if the customer’s subscription was set up with Stripe Enhanced?
- A: Yes, but you will need to be on Pro+ and Learn+ level accounts, and Connect+ is required to be enabled on the product at cancellation.
- A: Yes, but you will need to be on Pro+ and Learn+ level accounts, and Connect+ is required to be enabled on the product at cancellation.
- Q: My customer’s subscription was processed through PayPal, can they retain access until the end of the billing cycle when they cancel?
- A: Yes, as long as Connect+ is enabled on the product.
Related Articles
- How subscriptions are processed within ThriveCart
- Your Customer’s Subscriptions
- ThriveCart: Learn – Overview
- Customers & subscription self-cancellations
Still Need Help?
If you’ve followed these steps and are still experiencing issues or have additional questions, please contact our support team here.