Stripe Casually Removes the Pause Subscription Feature from the Customer Portal.
Stripe's Letter to Customers:
Hi there,
We wanted to let you know Stripe has removed the pause subscription feature from the Customer Portal as of March 29, 2024.
We removed this feature because the ‘Pause plan’ button in Customer Portal did not behave as expected. When your customers clicked ‘Pause plan’, Stripe paused the collection of payments for that subscription, but the subscription status remained unchanged.
We recognize the inconvenience this may have caused for your business and are committed to helping you find the best path forward. We recommend you take the following actions.
As of March 29, 2024, none of your subscriptions have had their payments paused in the Customer Portal.
In the future, Stripe intends to support changing the subscription’s status to ‘paused’ in the Dashboard, API, and Customer Portal.
If you have questions, please read our FAQ or contact support—we’re here to help.
– The Stripe team
This is more than "inconvenient" it's a colossal development failure - especially for subscription businesses.
ArtCube Nation, as a subscription business, needs to offer options, even if it is a short-term loss.
Revenue is NOT everything.
Pausing an ArtCube Nation account was part of how we cater to “Feast or Famine” Creative Freelancers and Small businesses.
During COVID and the WGA /SAG Strike, it helped freelancers manage lean times.
We, obviously give up revenue, but only for a bit, Cubers know we’ll be around when they need job alerts or to off load set dressing and materials at wrap.
Freelancers and Vendors need control of their finances.
Freelancers and Vendors have to keep a tight grip on finances, so providing a method to customize the Cube “experience” was and still is important to us.
We’d rather have your trust and faith than your dollars.
Sometimes long jobs, a life change or travel make ArtCube irrelevant for a few months and we are okay with that!
We just want The Cuber to know we fully comprehend the lifestyle and are here to accommodate that.
ArtCube has to pay pricey developer dollars to integrate the feature. Now we have to undevelop it and pay the developer again to DECREASE our offerings.
This is not “inconvenient”. It’s lose/lose for ArtCube and companies like it. To put it mildly, developers get a lot of work because of Stripe. If their support was helpful or their developers on staff were helpful, it would be less painful.
But every time I write in it’s us, not them. Now I know how “unaccountable” they are.
Maybe they have all the in-house developers they need, but for small businesses like ArtCube, it’s a tough pill to swallow to pay to lose revenue and lose progress.
We had to build a billing page USING Stripe’s portal and API, thinking it was safe to integrate and TESTED.
Stripe has known about this for a while and were silent.
In developer forums like GitHub, this has come up quite a bit, but I also suspect that Stripe has scrubbed the hallways of this enormous flub.
Stripe’s Support is a gaslighting mechanism.
What ArtCube is Offering Paused Members
Welp, what we can. Lemons to lemonade, blah, blah, blah.We are adding a 30-day free promo code to all paused Professional members so. they can Cube for free and decide in a month if they want to stay or go. Especially since April 8th, 2024, the Professional/Freelancer Fee went up to $10 for new customers going forward. They will get an email from me and I am going to go through every account personally.We hope this brings some of the creative community back into the fold with the understanding that ArtCube is about PEOPLE first.
