Its currently possible to receive unlimited free trials by simply cancelling the sub and then creating a new one. The only way to prevent his it to set the Subscription product to “Limit to one of any status”. However, this setting is not available for product vendors, prevents having multiple subscriptions to the same product and blocks the user from upgrading/downgrading the subscription at a later time. To upgrade/downgrade the user has to first resubscribe. Also, reusbscribing is blocked if the customer cancelled during the free trial as per https://woocommerce.com/document/subscriptions/customers-view/#section-18.
To fix all of this, please block customers from receiving a second free trial or atleast have a setting for this.
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Last updated: September 5, 2023
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There’s a partial workaround short of this feature: on the product, Product data → Advanced → Limit subscription → “Limit to one of any status.”
That makes the product non-purchasable for anyone who’s ever subscribed (any status, including cancelled). Their only path back is the Resubscribe button on the subscription in My Account, and Resubscribe doesn’t grant the free trial — so the repeat-trial loop is closed.
The only down side to this is that it blocks all re-purchases from the shop for that specific product, not just the trial — a legit returning customer can’t just buy again; they must Resubscribe, or an admin has to delete their old subscription to free them up.
If you’d rather keep buying normal and only drop the trial for returners (let them purchase, just bill from day one), it’s a bit of code instead: detect prior ownership with wcs_user_has_subscription( $user_id, $product_id, ‘any’ ) and return 0 from the woocommerce_subscriptions_product_trial_length filter for those customers.
A first-class “one trial per customer” setting would still be the better fix.
Hi there,
We recently consolidated a few related requests into this one. In doing so, we noticed some additional use cases and perspectives worth capturing here:
– Beyond the cancel-and-resubscribe exploit, customers can also abuse free trials by switching between different **variations** of the same variable subscription product — cancelling from one variation and resubscribing to another resets the trial eligibility. A complete solution should cover cross-variation trial reuse, not just the same-variation case.
We’ve noted these for the team when reviewing this request.
why support still sleeping over this?? this is most basic feature
Is this still the case? I see a Reddit thread on this exact topic from 8 months ago (June 2024).
I’d classify this as a major bug, because it makes free/paid trials unusable.
I cannot believe this is still not a standard setting. Memberpress has an option “Allow Only One Free Trial” that is automatically set. It seems like this would be paramount to a free trial. I am seeing a lot of abuse of my free trial and now my only option is to remove it or to ask for billing details, but this last option has been shown to have a much lower retention rate. Please can you fix this?