Contents
Access Subscriptions
Every purchase creates an Access Subscription: a record that one customer has access to one product from a start date to an end date. A window, in other words. A purchase of two products creates two.
An Access Subscription is published while its window is open, and that is what gives access. It moves through three states:
- Pending
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Paid, but its window starts later, because it continues time the customer already has. It grants nothing yet. The Access Subscriptions page shows it with a yellow pause button that says when it starts.
- Active
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Its window is open. It is published, and the customer has the product's user groups.
- Ended (shown to customers as Inactive)
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Its window is over, or the payment was refunded in full or charged back. It is unpublished and kept as history.
The lifecycle task moves Access Subscriptions from one state to the next on time: it publishes the pending ones whose window has started and unpublishes those whose window has ended, and adds or removes user groups as it does. A webhook for a purchase that starts now publishes the Access Subscription immediately, without waiting for the task.
An Access Subscription you unpublish or trash yourself stays that way: the task publishes only pending ones. It grants nothing, new purchases don't wait for it, and it gets no expiry reminders. Publishing one whose window hasn't started makes it pending again.
Renewing never changes an existing Access Subscription. Each renewal, automatic or by hand, is a new payment and creates a new Access Subscription for the period it pays for, so the list of a customer's Access Subscriptions is the history of what they paid for.
Note
A purchase that is started but never paid leaves no Access Subscription. Paddle tells your site about a checkout as soon as it opens; PaddleSubs records the transaction, and only creates access when Paddle says it was paid.