The subscription lifecycle | Faceless AI - Dataspheres AI

You now own the whole lifecycle The store used to handle renewals, cancellations, grace periods, and refunds. Off-platform, that is your job, and getting i...

You now own the whole lifecycle The store used to handle renewals, cancellations, grace periods, and refunds. Off-platform, that is your job, and getting it wrong shows up as involuntary churn and support tickets. What to build or configure Self-serve management: a billing portal where users update cards, change plans, and cancel. Both Stripe and the Merchant-of-Record tools provide one — use it rather than building your own. Dunning: when a renewal card fails, retry on a schedule and email the user, or you will silently lose paying customers. This is the single most valuable piece of plumbing after the checkout itself. Refunds and chargebacks: decide your refund policy and wire refunds to revoke entitlement through the same webhook path that grants it. A Merchant of Record absorbs much of the chargeback handling for you. Proration and plan changes: upgrades, downgrades, and annual/monthly switches should adjust entitlement immediately and bill the difference correctly. The reliability rule Every money event — paid, renewed, failed, canceled, refunded — must flow through one webhook handler that updates one entitlement record. Do not let the app decide access on its own; the app reads the entitlement, the backend owns it. That single discipline prevents the most common and most expensive off-platform bugs. Educational material, not legal or tax advice. App-store rules and the underlying court cases are changing month to month in 2026 — always confirm the current terms in Apple's and Google's own developer documentation before you ship, and get professional advice for your jurisdiction.