A few weeks ago we rolled out an important tweak to how automatic renewals are handled in Spreedly. Previously, all renewals were run at least 24 hours before the subscription expired so that if there was an error there was some time to correct it before the subscription lapsed. For a long time this worked just fine, but there were some definite weaknesses with it, such as 24 hours being a really short amount of time within which to correct a problem.

As part of some other work that we were doing, we decided to go ahead and implement grace periods for renewals, which are a major improvement over the previous setup. With grace periods, we attempt a renewal less than 12 hours before the subscription expires. The key difference is that if the renewal fails, we allow continued access for the grace period (currently hard coded to three days) during which time the problem can be resolved and the subscription successfully renewed.

Features like grace periods are pretty mundane and low-level, so I hope I haven’t bored you too much. That said, it’s just another example of our ongoing quest here at Spreedly: to handle the grunt work of billing so you don’t have to. We want you spending your time making your product awesome, not on trying to get paid. We’ll navigate those waters so you don’t have to!

If you have any questions about grace periods don’t hesitate to drop a comment below or send us an email.