Skip to main content
This page compares how payment methods differ for subscriptions (recurring billing) across billing model, frequency, trial period, and management, so you can decide quickly when choosing a payment method or designing your subscription integration.
This is not a complete list of available payment methods. Whether a payment method supports subscriptions, and its exact capabilities, depend on your merchant contract and the paymethodconfig/inquiry response. Always treat Webhook notifications or an active query as the source of truth for subscription status and each billing result.

​
Two billing models

Who drives renewals determines most of the differences:
  • Waffo-managed — After the customer authorizes the first payment, Waffo automatically charges the payment method on each billing cycle. Cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPay, other major wallets, and Paidy fall into this category.
  • Channel-managed — The payment channel drives recurring charges on its own schedule; Waffo does not trigger them. PIX falls into this category.
The billing model directly affects whether upgrade/downgrade, update, and deferred start are available (see Table B).

​
Billing and frequency

​
Trial and management

​
Column reference

  • Billing model — Waffo-managed: Waffo charges the payment method automatically on each cycle; channel-managed: the payment channel drives recurring charges on its own mechanism.
  • Subscription model — Payment-first: on a failed renewal, service is suspended and no further periods are attempted; service-first: on a failed renewal, service continues and later periods are still attempted.
  • Supported billing frequency — Set via “period type + interval”; there is no standalone “yearly” type, so annual is expressed as “monthly × 12”.
  • Trial period — Configure a free (0) or discounted trial; the trial amount must be less than the regular period amount.
  • Subscription management — Whether you can upgrade/downgrade a plan (change), modify the amount (update), and set a future start (deferred start) via API. “Coming soon” means the capability is being rolled out.
  • User-initiated cancellation — Whether the customer can cancel from the payment method side (the cancellation is reported back to Waffo). Every payment method can be canceled from the merchant side; see the common rules below.

​
Common to all payment methods

  • A single set of subscription APIs: create, inquiry, cancel, manage, change, update.
  • subscriptionManagementUrl is required when creating a subscription.
  • Every payment method can be canceled by calling the cancel API from the merchant side.
  • Subscription refunds follow the contract’s refund rules (not allowed / full / partial).
  • On a failed renewal, Waffo automatically retries: by default 2 attempts (including the first charge), once per day. Contact Waffo to adjust.
  • Subscription status changes and each billing result are delivered via Webhook.