PayPlans, on the way of enriching itself with worthful features, introduces trial subscription and Set-up fee concept with an exceptionally new approach. The reason behind bringing new approach is different strategies of payment gateways for allowing Set-up fee and trial subscription. And we wanted a common solution that integrates well with all the payment gateways .

Since PayPlans currently supports PayPal, 2checkout and Authorize.net, the difficulty in front of us was to overcome their different feature set.

• Paypal allows us to give two different trial subscription and it does not provide any way for Set-Up fee.
• In Authorize.Net we can set up trial subscription with only one amount and does not support Set-up fee.
• 2checkout does not have facility of trial subscription, but it supports Set-Up Fee.

So a new approach has been accepted which will implement both the feature with some intelligence for all the above mentioned payment gateways.

You can charge a separate amount for first installation and after that regular price will be charged. A restriction is there that you can not change the time period for trial subscription, it should be same as recurring period of regular price.  But it ensures that it will work with all payment gateways which support either Trial subscription or Set-up Fee.

Let's have a look on examples :-

Trial subscription (through PayPal) : Through a recurring plan, i am charging users $30 for every 2 months with 6 recurrence count. But I want to charge only $10 for first two months (recurring period) as Trial Subscription .

Set-up Fee (through 2checkout) : Charging $10 extra (upon $30) for first recurring period to set up user's account. So first price is of $40 inclusive of set-up (start-up) fee and regular price.

Trial subscription (through 2checkout) : If you want to charge $10 for first month as trial subscription and then $30 every month for next 2 months, then set first price as $10. It will automatically set $-20 in start-up fee (in case of 2 checkout only) and add it to regular price as shown below :

This way PayPlans is giving you flexibility to set trial subscription and set-up fee with any of the payment gateways. This all will be available to you in PayPlans 1.2. Till then, stay tuned to know about upcoming features.