With prepaid subscriptions, your customer pays today and the subscription starts on a later date that you choose. The start date can be up to 6 months after the payment.
Some ways to use it:
- A customer wants to pay this year for a plan that starts next quarter.
- You sell a seat for a course or program that begins later.
- You close a deal now, and the service starts when onboarding is complete.
How to create a prepaid subscription
- Go to Subscriptions and click Add Subscription.
- Select the customer, product and plan as usual.
- In Subscription Term Start on, pick the future date when the subscription should start.
- Under Collect payment, select Now (prepaid).
- Choose how to collect the payment:
- Credit Card: the customer's saved card is charged right away.
- Offline Payment / Create Invoice: an invoice is created for you to send to the customer. They can pay it by card, PayPal or Razorpay from the invoice link, or you can record the payment yourself.
- Add the subscription reason and save.
If you leave Collect payment on On start date (the default), nothing changes from before: the invoice is created and the payment is collected on the start date.
What happens, step by step
- Before payment: the subscription is Pending.
- After payment: the subscription becomes Prepaid (purple badge). The invoice is marked paid.
- On the start date: the subscription becomes Live automatically. Nothing is charged on this day, because the customer already paid for the first period.
- One billing period after the start date: the first renewal is charged as usual.
Example (yearly plan): you create the subscription on Nov 4, 2026, with the start date Jan 31, 2027.
- Nov 4, 2026: the customer pays the first year. Status: Prepaid.
- Jan 31, 2027: the subscription goes Live. No charge.
- Jan 31, 2028: the first renewal is charged.
The first payment covers the period from the start date to the first renewal (here Jan 31, 2027 to Jan 31, 2028), not the time between the payment and the start date.
Paying with PayPal or Razorpay
When the customer pays the invoice with PayPal or Razorpay, they approve a normal recurring subscription:
- The first payment (the full invoice amount) is taken today.
- The gateway's first automatic charge is set to one billing period after the start date. In the yearly example above, both PayPal and Razorpay charge next on Jan 31, 2028.
- This also works with the furthest start date allowed. A yearly plan that starts 6 months from today has its first automatic charge about 18 months after the payment, and both gateways accept it.
- PayPal bills by calendar day, so its renewal can come a few hours earlier than the start time. The next billing date in Pabbly Subscription Billing always shows the gateway's real date.
What you can do while a subscription is Prepaid
- Cancel: you can cancel it immediately. Cancelling does not refund the payment automatically; refund it yourself if needed. "Cancel at the end of the current term" is not available before the start date. For PayPal and Razorpay, the subscription at the gateway is cancelled too.
- Refund: a full refund of the prepaid payment before the start date cancels the subscription automatically, including at PayPal or Razorpay, so the customer is not charged again. A partial refund keeps the subscription Prepaid.
- Not available until the start date: pause, upgrade/downgrade and change billing date. These work as usual once the subscription is Live.
- Changing the start date: this is not possible on a prepaid subscription. Cancel it, refund the payment if needed, and create a new one with the correct date.
Good to know
- The start date must be in the future and at most 6 months away. PayPal and Razorpay only allow refunds within about 6 months of a payment, so this limit keeps every prepaid payment refundable until the subscription starts.
- Trials are skipped. If the plan has a free trial, it does not apply, because the customer pays upfront.
- The first payment is the full invoice: the plan price plus any setup fee, addons and tax, minus any coupon. Renewals charge the plan's normal recurring amount.
- One-time and fixed-cycle plans work too. A one-time plan is paid now and starts on the start date. A plan with a fixed number of payments counts the prepaid payment as the first one.
- If the card is declined, the subscription stays Pending with an unpaid invoice, and the customer can pay the invoice later. A card that needs 3D Secure authentication stays Pending until the customer completes the authentication.
- An unpaid prepaid subscription never starts. It does not go Live on the start date until its invoice is paid. Once the invoice is overdue, your usual unpaid-invoice (dunning) settings apply.
- If the invoice is paid after the start date, the subscription goes Live right away, and billing still counts from the start date.
- If the paid invoice is deleted before the start date, the subscription does not go Live on the start date; it goes back to Pending instead.
- Webhooks and access: Payment Success is sent on the payment day. Subscription Activate is sent on the start date, and license codes are issued on the start date. If you give access based on webhooks, use Subscription Activate.
- Reports: the payment counts as revenue on the day it is received. The subscription counts as active (and in MRR) from its start date.
- Customer portal: the customer sees the subscription as Prepaid. They can't upgrade it before the start date, and they are told that cancelling does not refund the payment automatically.
- Invoice note: the invoice shows the customer when the paid period starts and when recurring payments begin.
- Where it's available: prepaid subscriptions are created from Add Subscription in your dashboard. Checkout pages work as before.
Pabbly Subscription Billing Team•Updated Nov 2, 2026•5 min read