Posted on 08/03/23 05:03 am
We have made some updates to subscription renewal, including a highly requested feature: automatic subscription renewal retries! If renewal fails and you top up your account, but forget to manually renew your subscription, we’ll take care of it for you. We’ll attempt a second renewal before your subscription expires. Note that this will only occur for new subscriptions or subscriptions that have successfully renewed after October 18th, 2022.
There are also other smaller changes related to renewal that have been made, which are detailed below:
Subscriptions will not move to the next cycle when renewal succeeds, and will only do so at the end of their current cycle. So the date a subscription ends will not change until that date.
We’ve added information to the subscription details page indicating the date that individual lines have been renewed through, to make it clear what has been renewed. See the image below highlighting where to find this information.
The text of our automated emails has been improved to provide more detail about the subscription involved.
Renewal costs now reflect the costs for the current cycle. If a subscription has already renewed, then the renewal costs will show up as zero as there is nothing left to renew.
API Changes
Along with this comes a few changes to our APIs around subscriptions.
As in the UI, when renewal occurs for a subscription (automatically or manually), the start and end dates will not update until the end of the subscription cycle.
As in the UI, the renewal cost for a subscription is now only for the current cycle. If a subscription has already renewed this cycle, the renewal cost will show as zero until the subscription is updated to the next cycle at the end of the current one.
Subscription reservations have two new fields on them, “prepaidCycles” and “renewedThrough”.
PrepaidCycles is the number of cycles for which the reservation has been prepaid, which is increased by 1 when renewal succeeds.
RenewedThrough is the projected date for which a reservation has been renewed through, based on the subscription cycle and the number of prepaid cycles of the reservation. The reservation will need to be renewed again before that date for it to continue.
Subscriptions have a new field “cycleLength” that indicates the duration of the subscription’s cycle. This will be in the format “d.h:mm:ss”, so a subscription lasting 36 hours would have a duration of “1.12:00:00”.
Posted byMike McKayOctober 18, 2022Posted inPublishedLeave a commenton Subscription Renewal Improvements: Automatic Retries
Shorter Rentals and Instant Availability
We’re excited to announce that we are now selling shorter temporary numbers (1 day and 3 day) as well as offering the option of buying any of our products with instant availability (no need to ever hit Wake Up before using your line).
Shorter Rentals
In addition to being able to purchase a number for a single service for one week or two weeks, you now have the option to reserve a line for only one or three days for a reduced price. No need to pay more if you only need it for a short amount of time. Please note that like one and two week lines, these are not renewable. If you think you might need to get it back after the period you purchased it for, a one month line might be a better fit for you (since these can be renewed as much as you want).
Instant Availability
We know many of you don’t like having to “Wake Up” your lines before using them. To better serve you, we introduced the option to purchase lines that you will always be ready to receive messages without you ever having to wake them up. You can now buy any of our products with Instant Availability to make sure you will always get your messages without delay.
For temporary numbers, simply flip the Instant Availability toggle for the subscription length you wish to purchase. Then checkout like you normally do and the number(s) you purchase will always be availabile without any need to ever wake them up.
When purchasing permanent numbers, you will see a new screen giving you the option of either the standard availability (which requires Wake Up), or Instant Availability.
Please feel free to reach out to support if you have any questions or suggestions. We are always trying to adjust what we offer to better serve you.