Support for One-Time Fee + Recurring Subscription for Digital Product Variants

Feature RequestMay 20, 2025

I’d love to see Creem support a hybrid billing model where a customer is charged a one-time fee upfront, followed by a recurring subscription (e.g., monthly or yearly). This is especially useful for digital product sellers like me, who offer both lifetime deals and update/maintenance subscriptions.

My Use Case:

I sell a digital product (a boilerplate) with two variants:

Lifetime Deal:
- One-time payment (e.g., $30)
- No updates or support in the future
Ongoing Updates Access:
- One-time setup fee (e.g., $30 for the product itself)
- Plus a recurring subscription (e.g., $10/month) for access to future updates, support, or new features

Currently, there's no way to implement this cleanly in Creem. Other platforms like LemonSqueezy support this out of the box

Why This Is Important:

This pricing model is becoming increasingly common among indie developers and product creators. It allows us to:

Monetize the core product fairly with a one-time fee
Sustain long-term development and support through recurring revenue
Offer clear and flexible options to customers

Feature Request:

Please consider enabling the ability to:

Charge a one-time setup fee
Start a recurring subscription immediately or after a delay (configurable per product/variant)

This could be built as part of the product setup, where creators can add both a one-time charge and a recurring plan in the same offer.

Thanks for considering — I believe this would unlock a ton of flexibility for creators like me and make Creem a great fit for many digital product businesses.

Posted by User · May 20, 2025

Completed12

User

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Nov 14, 2025

There’s 3 different billing methods that all somewhat relate to each other that would significantly improve Creem.

Usage based / Pay as you go with threshold triggered top ups
Hybrid 1: Time based subscription with PAYG triggered additional credit top ups
Hybrid 2: OTP with recurring subscription.

“Pay as you Go/Usage” is crucial for us to adopt Creem and for a number of AI SaaS companies that have PAYG tier as their base tier or only tier as they charge on AI token usage.

The PAYG solution needs to be an upfront payment that triggers on a user defined threshold and tops up for a user defined amount, the upfront payment is crucial to remove the risk of non payment.
Likewise the hybrid subscription with PAYG would also have a credit pool that triggers on a threshold and the unused credit would carry over to the following billing periods.
Also the option to age out unused credits in stages ie after 3 months drops to 75% 6 months 50% 9 months 25% 12 months 0% this is to remove bad debt from your books inline with you terms and conditions
- to be clear this is relative to the original amount not the current amount of the payment being aged out, i.e. if a customer buys $100 in credit and at 3 months they have $80 the reduction is to 75% of $100 or $75 not 75% of $80 or down to $60
- For this the customers payments would need to be dated and consumption tracked and the usage taken from the oldest.
Lastly on this with subscriptions that include a set amount of credit the ability to roll over unused credit into following billing periods and age out