How subscriptions work

Subscriptions allows you to manage recurring payments with flexibility and ease, be it weekly, monthly, or yearly. Beyond automated scheduling, Subscriptions is designed to enhance the end-user experience and improve payment success rates with advanced features, ensuring an efficient subscription management process with low-cost integration.

Solutions

You can set up recurring payment plans for your end users with ease. Simply define the amount, schedule, and recovery options for failed payments, and Xendit will handle the scheduling and automatic deductions. All you need to do is monitor webhook events to track payment confirmations for each billing cycle.

Create subscriptions

Before you begin

To create a subscription plan, you must have at least one active payment channel that supports Merchant-Initiated Transactions.

Check compatibility: Go to the Available Payment Channels table and apply the Merchant-Initiated Transaction filter to see which channels support this.
For more information on how to activate payment channels, please click here.

Create subscriptions via dashboard

Go to the Subscriptions page
Click Create New
Enter the subscription plan details, such as the amount to charge and the list of items
Select subscription cycle (weekly, monthly, etc.).
Add the customer information by adding the Customer ID. If you don’t have the Customer ID, click Add New Customer
Configure optional failed payment handling for the subscriptions on:
1. Retry settings for failed payments to maximize success rates
2. Payment Link options to allow customer to pay on failure
3. Deactivate plan if all payment attempts fail
Click Create Plan
Share the subscription link with your customer

Once your customer links their auto-debit payment method, their subscription will start automatically.

Create subscriptions via API integration

There are 2 entry points of creating subscriptions via our API:

Xendit Checkout UI
Use this entry point if you want to use Xendit’s hosted UI (via Payment Link or components) to collect and tokenize your user's payment method during the subscription setup.
Existing Payment Token
Use this entry point if you already have an existing payment token ID for your customer and want to create a subscription plan immediately.

Xendit Checkout UI

Existing Payment Token

Create Payment Session: Create a Payment Session with the type SUBSCRIPTION. In this request, you will define all critical subscription parameters, including amount and currency, billing cycle, anchor date, payment schedule, customer information and retry configuration
Redirect User: Redirect your user to the URL of payment link or via Component to proceed with the payment/linking process.
Webhooks: Once the session is successfully completed, you will receive:
- Payment Session completion, indicating the complete state of the current session
- Payment Token Webhook for the new payment method.
- Subscription Plan Webhook notification, indicating that the plan is active.
Management: Xendit will automatically start managing the schedule and deduct the user's balance based on the defined plan. Listen to our webhook notification on the cycle of the subscription.

Create Subscription Plan: You will create the subscription plan by providing the payment_token_id you already have.
Webhooks: Once the subscription request is completed, you will receive a Subscription Plan Webhook notification.
Management: Xendit will automatically start managing the schedule and deduct the user's balance based on the defined plan. Listen to our webhook notification on the cycle of the subscription.