Subscription

A subscription is a recurring billing arrangement in which a customer is charged automatically on a set cycle — monthly, yearly, or another interval — in exchange for continued access to a product or service. It's the core object of any subscription business and the thing that generates predictable recurring revenue.

How a subscription is built

In Stripe, a subscription ties a customer to one or more prices. Each price belongs to a product and defines the amount and the billing interval. At the start of each billing cycle, Stripe generates an invoice and attempts to collect payment from the customer's saved payment method.

A subscription carries a status that reflects where it is in its life: trialing, active, past_due when a payment has failed, and canceled when it ends.

Why it matters

Subscriptions are what make recurring revenue predictable. Every active subscription contributes to MRR, and the flow of subscriptions starting, upgrading, downgrading, and canceling is what drives that number up or down. Watching those changes is how you understand growth, not just from new sales but from the health of the existing base.

Subscriptions and ChargeBell

ChargeBell turns subscription events into plain-English Slack alerts with the numbers already computed. A new subscriber, a plan change, a trial ending, or a cancellation each arrives with its exact MRR impact. It's read-only Stripe access — ChargeBell can never create, change, or cancel a subscription — so Stripe stays the source of truth while your team gets the signal in Slack.