What is Pay As You Go (Prepaid)?
Selecting a Pay As You Go (Prepaid) selling plan works very similar to a Pay As You go plan, where you get a new order for each delivery at $0.
Just like a classic prepaid auto-renew plan, your customers will pay upfront for a certain number of fulfillments.
Once the Billing Frequency has been met, the subscription will be renewed for another cycle, identical to a prepaid auto-renew plan.
The key difference here is how the order is handled in Shopify. With a Prepaid Auto-renew plan, once the order is created the first fulfillment status will be labeled as unfulfilled and all subsequent orders will stay in scheduled status and only move to unfulfilled once they are ready to be fulfilled again for each delivery customer has paid for at the time of signing up.
For a Pay As You Go (Prepaid) plan, once the first order is placed, this will be a stand-alone order with the full price being charged to the customer. All the other deliveries will come in Shopify as a new recurring order with a $0 price until all the orders are delivered to the customer for that paid billing cycle.
Pay As You Go (Prepaid) in Action
In the example below we've configured two selling plans to highlight the difference between how Shopify handles both order types.
Prepaid: Order Fulfillment Frequency every 3 months, Billing Frequency every 6 months.
Pay As You Go (Prepaid): Order Fulfillment Frequency every 3 months, Billing Frequency every 6 months.
As you can see in the screenshot below, both first orders are unfulfilled and are immediately fulfilled. The big difference here is that the next delivery for the Prepaid order goes into the Scheduled state and Shopify will turn its status to unfulfilled on the date of delivery, without any new order being pushed into Shopify again. As explained in the below document by Shopify, for prepaid subscription orders.
Managing and fulfilling prepaid subscription orders
Prepaid Subscription first (parent order):
Deliveries for this prepaid order:
The next cycle will renew similarly after 6 months for this above Prepaid subscription.
Pay As You Go (Prepaid) first order:
The remaining orders for Pay As You Go (Prepaid) will be pushed into Shopify each month at $0 by Appstle. After the cycle completes, the subscription will renew for the next cycle in the same manner.