Pause or cancel a subscription immediately

What's new?

You can now pause or cancel subscriptions immediately. This means that immediately is now an accepted allowed value for effective_from when sending a request to pause or cancel a subscription.

How it works

Previously, you could only pause or cancel an active subscription at the end of the current billing period. Paddle creates a scheduled_change against a subscription to say the subscription should pause or cancel effective of the next billing period, then automatically applies that scheduled change when it's due.

We updated the Paddle platform so now you can pause or cancel a subscription right away by including effective_from with the value of immediately in the body of your request.

effective_from was already a valid field in request bodies when pausing or canceling a subscription, but the only accepted allowed value for active subscriptions was next_billing_period. immediately was only an accepted allowed value in requests to cancel paused subscriptions, but now it's accepted when pausing and canceling active subscriptions too.

As before, effective_from defaults to next_billing_period when working with active subscriptions, so sending an empty request body or omitting this field in your request results in a cancellation or pause at the end of the next billing period. This behavior is unchanged.

Next steps

This change is available in version 1 of the Paddle API.

It's a non-breaking change, meaning it doesn't impact existing integrations.

You can send a request to pause or cancel a subscription using the API to use the new allowed value.