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You do not always need to charge upfront. Kelviq lets you offer completely free plans or time restricted trials to help acquire users.

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Free plans

Use a free plan to offer a permanent zero cost tier. This is perfect for open source products, lead magnets, or a basic hobby tier where you want to gather signups without requiring a credit card.
  1. Open your draft plan
  2. Toggle the switch in the top right from Paid to Free
  3. Save your changes
Users who select this plan bypass the payment step entirely. They still get access to the customer portal and any deliverables or entitlements attached to the plan.

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Putting new signups on a free plan

Entitlement checks return false for a customer Kelviq has never seen, so a free plan only takes effect once the customer has a subscription to it. To enrol someone at signup rather than sending them through checkout:
  1. Create the customer with an email address — customers.create in the SDK, or POST /customers/.
  2. Create the subscription — POST /subscriptions/create/ with the plan’s identifier and chargePeriod: "ONE_TIME".
Keep that order, and enrol at signup, before the customer reaches checkout. Creating a subscription for a customer Kelviq has not seen fails with Subscription requires a customer with a valid email address — and the failed attempt still registers the customer, without an email. Creating a checkout session with a customerId registers the customer the same way. From then on POST /customers/ answers Customer already exists, and the portal refuses that customer too. Recover by patching the email onto the existing record with PATCH /customers/{customerId}/, after which the subscription call succeeds. Treat Customer already exists as a signal to patch rather than an error to surface. Enrolling this way also records a $0 order for the plan. Check for an existing subscription first, with customer_id on GET /subscriptions/. Creating a second subscription for the same customer is allowed: the new one becomes active and the previous one becomes superseded. Nothing breaks, but enrolling on every visit churns through subscription records for no reason.

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Free trials

Free trials let customers test a paid plan for a specific number of days before their card is charged.
Trials are available only when the plan has at least one recurring billing cycle. A one-time-only plan does not show trial settings and will not display a trial at checkout.
  1. Open a paid plan draft.
  2. Enable at least one recurring billing cycle, such as 28 days, Monthly, or Yearly.
  3. Enable Free trial.
  4. Enter the number of days the trial should last.
If you later disable the final recurring billing cycle and leave only one-time pricing, Kelviq removes the trial from the one-time offer. When a customer signs up they must enter a valid payment method. We authorize the card but do not charge it. When the trial period ends Kelviq automatically charges the card and begins the regular billing cycle. If the user cancels before the trial ends they are not charged.