Improvements to Subscriptions
Smarter tools to manage and boost your subscriptions business

Paystack Subscriptions helps you automatically collect payments from your customers at set intervals (weekly, monthly, annually, etc.) without the customer manually entering their card details every time they pay you.
In the past few months, we've made several improvements to the Subscriptions product. Here's what's new.
Subscribers can now replace the cards tied to their Subscriptions
Previously, once a subscription was created, there was no way for your subscribers to change the debit or credit card tied to that subscription, even after the card expired.
Your subscribers can now change their cards from a self-serve Subscriptions Preferences page. Here's more info on helping a subscriber update their card.

Expiring card notifications
On the first day of every month, you'll now receive an email and a webhook event containing a list of all customers whose cards will expire that month. You can also filter your list of subscribers on the Dashboard to track customers whose cards will expire soon.

If your subscriber has a card on file that's about to expire, we'll send them an email alerting them of this. These emails contain a link from where they can replace their about-to-expire cards.

Additionally, from your Paystack Dashboard, you can always manually trigger an email to subscribers that allows them update their card details.

New Subscription statuses
Before now, we had only two subscription statuses — Completed and Active. Now we're adding four new ones, which will go live on Wednesday, November 3, 2021.
Here are the two existing subscription statuses:
- Active: All active subscriptions (including renewing, non-renewing, and those that require attention).
- Completed: A subscription is marked as "
Complete
" when a subscriber has made the maximum number of recurring payments you set for the subscription plan.
Here are the four new statuses we're adding:
- Active (non-renewing): A subscription is marked as "
Active (non-renewing)
" if the current cycle has been paid for, but the subscriber has cancelled their subscription, and so will not be charged in the future. - Active (renewing): These are active subscriptions that will be renewed.
- Cancelled: These are subscriptions that have been cancelled by you or your subscribers. The subscribers will not be charged in the future.
- Attention: This status is used for subscriptions that we're unable to charge for any reason, such as when a card has expired, or because the customer has insufficient funds in their bank account.
[Important] If you use the Subscriptions API, you might need to update your Paystack integration. This is to ensure that your subscriptions-related payment flows continue to work correctly after the new statuses are added on November 3.
NOTE: You won't need to do anything if you only use our Subscriptions product via our no-code tools like Payment Pages.
Here's the developer documentation detailing the new Subscriptions statuses that will be added to the API.
[Workshop] Walkthrough of new Subscription Statuses
Join our online technical workshop to speak with the Paystack Integrations team about the new Subscription statuses, and get all your questions answered about how to update your integration.
Date: Thursday, October 14
Time: 5 pm (WAT)
Sign up here →
New subscriptions management tools and improved Dashboard navigation
We've significantly improved the Subscriptions experience on the Dashboard to do two things:
- Help you make better decisions by giving you more useful information per subscription
- Help you find information more quickly by introducing powerful filters, and redesigning the Subscription interface
Here's what's new:
We've created a new section of the Dashboard called Recurring to help you find all your subscription tools and information in one place — Subscribers, Plans, and a brand new page called Subscriptions

The new Subscriptions page gives you a good overview of your subscriptions at a glance. You can now also quickly resolve issues, such as expiring customer cards, and customers having insufficient balance in their cards.

When you click on a subscription, you also see detailed and brand new information, such as customers' card expiry dates, the last 4 digits of their cards, the next charge date, and much more!

The Subscribers page has also been redesigned to be more intuitive and to provide more information per subscriber.


Now, you can see a list of all your subscribers in one place, export subscription data from one or more subscribers, filter the list smartly (by lifetime value, plans they're subscribed to, etc), and lots more.
The new Plans page provides overview information like how many people are subscribed to each Plan, and how much you've made from each Plan.

We also updated the design of the individual Plans pages to display a lot more information.

Improved notifications control
The Preferences section on the Dashboard now gives you more control over the notifications you and your subscribers receive about their subscriptions.

[Workshop] An introduction to Paystack Subscriptions

We're hosting an online workshop to show you all the different ways you can use Paystack to power a subscriptions business, and earn recurring revenue.
Join our Subscriptions team where they'll walk your through our recurring billing product suite end to end.
Date: Thursday, October 21
Time: 5 pm (WAT)
Sign up here →
Have questions?
Guaranteed recurring payments can be an incredible business model, and we look forward to seeing what you build with Paystack Subscriptions.
There are a lot more improvements to come, but in the meantime, sign up for our workshop, and send us an email at [email protected] if you have any questions at all. We're happy to help.