Irregular billing cycle

[JorisDebonnet]

I'm not sure whether this is considered a 'subscription' or a 'series of one-off charges', ... so I guess this is partly feature request, partly discussion.

Aside of a few monthly subscription plan, we also have a kind of "pay per use" plan, much like prepaid phone cards. It is currently planned to work like this: you start by paying 10 euro for 100 credits, and once you've used all of those credits, the engine will automatically order another 100 credits for 10 euro. Regardless of whether that's 2 days later, or 4 months later. And of course, it keeps repeating like that.

I'm not sure whether this is actually a common way to bill. Is there a name for it? Might support for it be considered, or will I have to implement it using the one-off charge, or is there a way to model this using the currently available subscription engine?

[Wulfheart]

Interesting. Let’s see what the answers are.

[sandervanhooft]

This is not a use case this package will be actively supporting.

But some key elements are already in place:

• balance management is already in place
• order management is already in place. If the user has enough balance, that will be used first. If not, a new Mollie payment will be triggered, but just to pay the remaining due order amount. You'd probably need a way to change the flow here a bit / add special OrderItems (on the right moment) specific to your use case. This may require some new hooks / events / container stuff, which I'm willing to consider if you can provide a PR, as long as it does not alter the core behavior.
• in any case you'll need to obtain a payment mandate using a FirstPayment. You can use this same payment to deposit the first balance. This is already in place.