Shopify Billing API - giving a user a free month

Question

I have an App in the Shopify App store that uses a recurring application charge. No problems there.

Sometimes, one of my users will make a suggestion to improve the app. I would like to reward them with a free month of using the app without being charged.

Based on the Shopify API, The only thing I can think of is to cancel the current recurring application charge, create a new charge for $0, then a month later cancel that charge and create new one for the original price. This is far from ideal. I believe that the user would need to accept every new charge that is created.

Is there a better way? Any suggestions?

Answer 1

Agreed that that sounds pretty far from ideal.

If you create a new recurring app charge with a 30 day trial period, Shopify will change the customer over to this new charge while respecting the trial period. The customer will still see a prorated charge for the partial payment cycle before you “upgraded their plan” after the trial is up, but this will effectively do what you want.

Answer 2

As of 2017 there is now an API for granting credits to merchants using your app: https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/using-the-shopify-api-to-credit-merchants-for-app-charges https://help.shopify.com/api/reference/applicationcredit