Specifics of postpaid subscriptions

The Postpay model means that a customer pays for consumed subscriptions after the end of the billing period. Compared to prepaid subscriptions, postpaid subscriptions have the following specifics:

• Their provisioning starts immediately after the order confirmation. No payment is required.
• They do not depend on the account balance. However, they can be paid from the account balance automatically and manually.
• They use individual current consumption amounts within the consumption limits set by the reseller (see Subscription details).
• They have a special stop type in case of expired payments — blocking.

In this article:

The consumption limit check

When you create an order for a postpaid subscription, it may be possible to increase the quantity of resources. It may cause unwanted debt for this subscription. To prevent this situation, the platform checks the consumption limit for a subscription. As a result, confirmation of an order is available only when one or several of the following conditions are met:

• The total amount of an order does not exceed the consumption limit for a subscription.
• The monthly payment for a subscription does not exceed the consumption limit for a subscription.
• The total amount of all charges of a subscription for the current billing period does not exceed the consumption limit for a subscription.
• The total amount of all charges of a subscription for the next billing period does not exceed the consumption limit for a subscription.

If you need to change the consumption limit for a subscription, contact your manager.

Manual approval by a manager

Your reseller may require manual approval by a manager to let an account use the Postpay model. In this case, the following limitations are applied to ordering postpaid subscriptions (only commercial or trial, too — depending on the reseller):

• The first order linked to a postpaid subscription will be created and provisioned only after manual approval by a manager.
• Creating any subsequent orders linked to postpaid subscriptions is not available until the manager approves the first order. The corresponding message with information about the review and applied limitations is displayed.

Conditions of subscriptions transition to the Blocked status

Subscriptions are blocked only within the Postpay model. A subscription is blocked automatically in the following cases:

• The grace period is expired for a subscription linked to a payment in the Expired status (see List of payments).
• The amount of consumption in the current period for a subscription exceeded the consumption limit.

Activation of blocked subscriptions

Activation of subscriptions blocked due to the payment expiration

Blocked subscriptions are activated automatically when the related payment gets the Completed or Paid from balance status. If there are any other conditions for blocking a subscription, the subscription remains in the Blocked status.

Activation of subscriptions blocked due to exceeding the consumption limit

Blocked subscriptions are checked for activation automatically:

• Once a day, during the billing process — if the amount of all charges that will be in the Blocked status after the subscription activation is less than the current consumption limit.
• When the consumption limit has been changed.

During the activation process, a blocked subscription acts as follows:

• Gets the status that was before Blocked.
• Remains in the Blocked status without moving to the Active status — if it is linked to an expired payments.