Does Stripe Checkout Support Free Plans?

Question

We're evaluating to use Stripe Checkout , and it seems that it always requires credit card info from the user (we don't want Stripe to require credit card info on its page). We want to provide a free trial, when it ends, we will ask for the credit card info. I've seen a question about adding a free $0 item to the plan, which Stripe does not support.

Is there any way that users select a paid plan (eg $20/month - 2 weeks trial period) and go to the Checkout page which does not ask for credit card info, then subscription and plan are created?

Answer 1

With Stripe Checkout you can create subscriptions with free trials [1]. But, Checkout will collect a payment method upfront when the customer subscribes to the trial. When using Checkout, there are currently no options that would enable customers to subscribe on a free trial without them first having to provide a valid payment method.

Instead, you can do the flow you're describing with a more custom Stripe integration where you would do the following:

1. Subscribe the customer on a free trial: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/trials
2. If the customer chooses to continue after the trial, collect their payment details: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/save-and-reuse

Note that you can still use Stripe Checkout for Step #2, you would just need to create the subscription manually in this case.

[1] https://stripe.com/docs/api/checkout/sessions/create#create_checkout_session-subscription_data-trial_period_days