How do you reward loyal paying users during a promo campaign without breaking your billing logic?
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Whenever we run a contest or promo to reward our community with free access the biggest headache is always our existing paid subscribers. They're the ones who support us the most so ignoring them or making the process complicated feels wrong. But auto extending active paid plans manually is quickly becoming an operational hassle.
I’m curious if anyone has found a clean automated solution for this.
Do you pause their recurring billing for a month gift them an upgraded feature tier instead or is there a simpler workflow I’m missing? Would love to know how other founders structure this to keep subscribers happy without messing up billing records.
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What kept billing clean for me was not touching the subscription at all. Promos in my app are a separate balance: holiday gift credits that anyone can claim once per campaign, subscribers included, spent before paid credits and expiring after 48 hours. The subscription renews exactly as before, so there is nothing to pause or extend and nothing to reconcile with the store. The claim is recorded per user in the same database transaction as the credits, so a second claim gives nothing. A new campaign is one config entry with dates and an amount, no release needed. If your product has any usage unit, gifting units instead of time keeps the billing records untouched.