Can I pause a student's subscription or payment plan?

Occasionally you may receive a request from a student looking to pause their subscription or payment plan on your Thinkific site. If needed, you can follow the steps below to do this with Thinkific Payments and Stripe.

With Thinkific Payments

If you need to pause or resume a student's subscription or payment plan, here's how you can with Thinkific Payments: 

1. Locate the Student on your Users page
2. Click on the student's name
3. Navigate to the Payments table
4. Click the ellipses (3 dot icon). This button will only show for products with Active or Past due statuses
5. Select Pause Subscription or, if currently paused, select Resume Subscription
   
6. You will receive a pop-up notification on the bottom right of your screen that the subscription or payment plan was paused or resumed successfully, and their enrollment status will update accordingly under Status in the Payments table

When paused, the student will retain access to the course until the end of their current billing cycle.

With Stripe

While Stripe does not currently support pausing subscriptions or payment plans for students, if you would like to remove a student's access for an extended period of time, you can use the following workaround:

1. In Thinkific, temporarily change the student's email address so that they cannot access their account (Remember to make note the original email address for future reference)
2. In Stripe, locate the customer profile and apply a 100% off coupon or add a free trial period. A 100% off coupon can be applied if the student will be away for an indeterminate amount of time and removed when they return. A free trial period can be used to delay the student's next invoice to a specific date. For instructions on how to set this up in Stripe, see this Stripe help article.
3. When the student returns, you can edit their email address back to what it was originally, and remove their free trial or 100% off coupon in Stripe to ensure that the subscription is being charged again.

Drip Schedule and Expiry Dates

Note that the student's enrollments will remain active in Thinkific, even though they won't be able to access their courses (since you have changed their email login.) This means that any courses that release content on a Drip Schedule, or have an expiry date or duration set, will not pause. If your courses use these settings, you may need to take additional steps to fully restore the student's subscription once their payments resume.