How a subscription works

Worth ten minutes if you are going to rely on this for income, because two of the rules below are not what people expect and both work in your customer's favour.

What your customer actually signs

Not a payment. They sign a spending limit: permission for your plan to take up to a set amount, per period, until a date they can see. That permission lives in their own wallet, held by a contract we did not write and cannot change.

The practical effect is that their worst case is a number they chose. Nothing can take more than the limit, nothing can take it earlier than the schedule, and the permission expires on its own.

Every period after that

When a period comes due, the charge is submitted and the money moves from their wallet to yours, with our 1% split off in the same transaction. Your customer is not asked, does not sign, and does not have to be online.

If a charge is late

You have a full period of grace. A charge collected late still collects the full amount and the schedule does not drift.

Past that, the missed period is gone permanently. A subscription left uncharged for six months cannot then be charged six times. That is deliberate: catching up is exactly the behaviour that gets payment contracts flagged as malicious, so the safe direction is also the lossy one.

Who actually presses the button

Nothing on a blockchain runs on a timer. Something outside has to submit each charge, and normally that is us. You do not have to run anything.

But for fixed-price plans anyone can submit the charge, including you. The amount is fixed by the subscription, and the money only ever moves from your customer to you, so a stranger submitting one gains nothing but the fee they paid to do it. It means that if our servers disappear, your subscriptions keep working and you are not waiting on us.