Trials

Let customers experience your product before they commit. Spaire handles the billing delay, payment collection, and abuse prevention automatically.

A trial gives a customer full access to a subscription product for a set period before any charge occurs. Payment details are collected at checkout — but no money moves until the trial ends. If the customer cancels before the trial ends, they’re never charged.

Set up a trial

Trials can be configured in three places:

• On the product — applies to all checkouts for that product by default
• On a checkout link — overrides the product’s trial for that link
• On a checkout session — overrides the product’s trial per-session via the API

A trial period is defined by a unit (day, week, month, year) and a duration (a number).

The trial set on a checkout link or session always takes precedence over the product-level trial.

Set a trial on a product

While creating or editing a product, toggle Enable trial period and set the duration.

Set a trial on a checkout session

const checkout = await spaire.checkouts.create({
  products: ['<product_id>'],
  trialPeriodDays: 14,
})

How it works

1. Customer checks out — payment info is collected, no charge occurs
2. Subscription status is set to trialing
3. At the end of the trial, Spaire charges the customer automatically
4. Subscription status moves to active

If the customer cancels before the trial ends: no charge, subscription moves to canceled.

Manage trials on existing subscriptions

You can add, extend, or end a trial from the dashboard on any active subscription:

Dashboard: Go to the subscription detail page → Update Subscription → Trial tab.

Extend: Set a new trial end date in the future. If the subscription was already active, it reverts to trialing and billing is postponed.

End early: Click End trial. The trial stops immediately, the subscription activates, and the customer is charged for the first full billing cycle right away.

Prevent trial abuse

Enable Prevent trial abuse in Settings → Subscriptions to block customers from claiming multiple trials across your products.

When enabled, Spaire blocks a new trial checkout if either of these matches a previous trial redemption:

• Email address — normalized to strip aliases (e.g., [e-mail] is treated as [e-mail])
• Payment method fingerprint — detects the same card even if a different email is used

A blocked customer sees: “You have already used a trial for this product. Trials can only be used once per customer.”

The checkout doesn’t fail — it automatically removes the trial and lets the customer subscribe at the regular price.

What’s next

Products

Set a default trial period directly on a product.

Checkout Sessions

Override trial length per-checkout from your backend.