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Lifecycle

Pause and resume

Temporarily suspending a subscription and its billing, with a defined effect on entitlements and the renewal date.

Pausing stops billing without cancelling. It is a retention tool: a customer with a seasonal business or a temporary budget freeze can stop paying without losing their data and their configuration.

The mechanics need to be explicit. Does the renewal date shift by the length of the pause, or stay fixed? Do entitlements end immediately or degrade to a read-only state? Is there a maximum pause length before the subscription cancels?

In metrics, a paused subscription is neither active nor churned, and a business that pauses a lot of accounts needs to decide which it counts as before the number is quoted anywhere.

Related terms

  • Upgrade and downgrade A subscription moving between plans, with proration, entitlement changes and revenue effects that differ by direction.
  • Customer churn The share of customers who cancelled in a period, counted as logos rather than as revenue.
  • Entitlement What a customer is allowed to use because of the plan they are on: which features, and up to what limits.