Submex Subscription Billing for WooCommerce

Submex turns WooCommerce products into subscriptions and runs the renewal billing for you — scheduling each charge, taking it, retrying it and recording every attempt — with a place in My Account where customers can see and cancel what they pay for.

Selling subscriptions

• A Subscription product type in the Product data panel, billed every day, week, month or year, or any multiple of them.

• Free trials in days, weeks, months or years, and sign-up fees.

• The price says how often it recurs wherever WooCommerce shows it, and the terms — the trial, the first payment, what follows, cancel anytime — are spelled out on the product page, in the cart and at checkout.

• Works with both the classic checkout and the block checkout.

• A guest can buy a subscription and have an account made at checkout, or you can require a login first.

• A checkout that costs nothing today — a free trial, or a coupon worth the whole first payment — still asks for a payment method whenever a later renewal will charge something, so the first renewal has a card to charge. Plans that renew for nothing are not asked.

Taking payment

• Stripe collects the card on Stripe’s own checkout page, and Submex charges it again whenever a renewal falls due, with a free trial saving the card without charging it.

• PayPal runs the schedule itself, and Submex keeps in step through PayPal’s webhooks.

• With no gateway at all, renewals become invoices the customer pays by hand.

• Payments that are confirmed days later — Direct Debit and bank payments — wait as pending: the customer keeps access, the renewal order waits on hold so it cannot be paid twice, and Submex never retries or re-charges it. The gateway settles it once the money is confirmed or refused.

• A failed or waiting renewal can be paid from its payment link. Paying it restarts the subscription exactly once, keeps the card it was paid with for later renewals, and is never charged again.

• A safeguard in the database means a renewal can never be charged twice, even when two processes try at the same moment.

• A charge whose result never arrived is checked with the gateway, not simply tried again.

• The next renewal is queued as soon as one is charged. Renewals missed while the site’s scheduler was not running are picked up by an hourly check, which by default charges once for the gap rather than once per missed period.

• In stores that enter prices including tax, renewals charge exactly what the checkout charged. VAT-exempt customers stay exempt on every renewal.

• A copy of the site on staging refuses to bill anyone.

For your customers

• My Account lists their subscriptions, what they pay and when the next payment is.

• They can cancel at the end of the period they paid for, or straight away. You cannot switch cancelling off. A subscription cancelled at the end of the period ends when that period runs out: access stops and nothing more is charged.

• If you turn on Ask before cancelling, they are asked for their main reason first. The reason is optional, and Continue canceling is always one click.

• They can turn off automatic renewal and keep what they paid for until the period ends.

• They can pay a renewal that failed, or one waiting on them, from its payment link.

• If you allow it, they can pay the next period early without moving their renewal date.

Running your store

• Overview walks you through setting up — connect a payment method, create a product, run a test renewal that charges nobody — then shows recurring revenue (net of tax), what needs your attention and your latest subscriptions.

• All subscriptions lets you search, filter, sort and change subscriptions in bulk, and open any one to see its history, charge it now or move its dates.

• Health checks, under Settings: whether the renewal queue is running, charges whose outcome is still unknown, renewals waiting more than 10 days for their payment provider to confirm them, whether the double-charge safeguard is in place, and subscriptions whose renewals add tax twice — listed with a Repair action, since subscriptions sold before 0.19.4 in tax-inclusive stores are never changed silently.

• Ten emails for the moments that matter — seven to the customer (including a reminder before each renewal) and three to you — each with a preview under Email Notifications on WooCommerce 9.6 and later.

• Customer roles and downloadable files that follow the subscription.

• FluentCRM: choose tags and lists on each subscription product. The contact has them while the subscription is active or in a free trial and loses them when it stops, and only tags and lists Submex added are ever removed.

• Integrations and Help screens, with a system report that never contains your keys.

• A REST API for subscriptions, open to logged-in store managers.

Submex Pro

A separate plugin adds:

• Plans and pricing: variable subscriptions, several plans per product, instalment and split payment plans, introductory renewal prices, fixed expiry dates, minimum terms, payment caps, purchase limits, shipping on renewals and delivery schedules.

• Keeping customers: pause and resume, plan switching, upgrade suggestions and “switch instead of cancelling”, a retention offer on cancellation, a win-back email campaign, anniversary thank-yous with an optional gift, and members-only content.

• Getting paid: configurable payment retries and a grace period, with a recovery report, card updates from My Account with expiring-card and “update your payment details” emails, recurring coupons and sign-up fee coupons, subscription webhooks, and WhatsApp notifications.

• More gateways: Square, Braintree, Authorize.net, Mollie, Xendit, Razorpay (UPI Autopay), GoCardless Direct Debit, Adyen, WooPayments, Paddle, and bKash and SSLCommerz by payment link.

• Checkout and emails: one-click checkout, your own Subscribe button text, trial ending and expiring soon reminders, and editing each email’s subject, heading and content inside Submex.

• Integrations: LearnDash, Tutor LMS, LearnPress, MailPoet, WP Fusion, AutomatorWP, AutomateWoo, AffiliateWP recurring referrals, BuddyBoss and BuddyPress groups, License Manager for WooCommerce and WP Software License.

• Reports, subscription health with a digest email, a live QR status page, and WooCommerce API keys on the subscription API.

External services

Submex talks to a payment provider only when you have switched that provider on and entered

its credentials. Nothing is sent anywhere by default, and Submex sends nothing to its own

author or to any analytics service.

PayPal

Used to create and run the billing plan, when PayPal is enabled under

Submex → Settings → PayPal.

com when the

environment is set to Sandbox. They are made when a subscription product is bought, and

whenever PayPal notifies the site of a payment so Submex can verify that the notification is

genuine. What is sent: the product name, the price, currency and billing cycle of the plan

including any free trial or sign-up fee, the order number, the customer’s first name, last

name and billing email, this site’s name and the addresses PayPal returns the customer to,

and — for verification — the notification PayPal sent back together with the signature

headers that came with it.

com/legalhub/useragreement-full — PayPal’s privacy

com/legalhub/privacy-full

Stripe

Used to take the card payment and charge each renewal, when Stripe is enabled under

Submex → Settings → Stripe.

com, with the test or live secret key depending on the

environment chosen. They are made when a customer pays by card at checkout, when they come

back from Stripe’s payment page so Submex can confirm the payment, whenever a renewal is

charged, and when Submex checks whether a renewal whose result never arrived was charged.

What is sent: the customer’s billing email, and their name if a card has to be linked to a

Stripe customer; the order number and amount, the currency, and the addresses Stripe returns

the customer to; and for a renewal, the amount, the currency, the subscription and order

numbers and the Stripe customer and card saved at checkout. The card itself is entered on

Stripe’s page and never reaches this site.

com/legal/ssa — Stripe’s privacy policy:

com/privacy

WordPress.org

The Integrations screen can install a companion plugin for you. Doing so asks

org for that plugin’s download, exactly as Plugins → Add New

does. It happens only when you click Install, and sends only the plugin’s slug.

Source code

The JavaScript for Submex’s admin screens is bundled, and its unbundled source ships in this

plugin’s src/ directory alongside the build configuration. To rebuild it:

npm install npm run build

The build uses @wordpress/scripts with the webpack, Tailwind and PostCSS configuration files

included in the plugin.