Giving customers a free subscription period

There are several reasons you might want to give someone access to a paid Plan without charging them: a free trial, a few complimentary months for an existing customer, ongoing access for an employee, and more.

Clerk Billing has three ways to handle these cases:

1. A free trial on a Plan
2. A 100% Discount on an existing Subscription
3. A $0 complimentary custom price you create and transition someone onto

All three can result in free access with paid Features. They differ in how conversion works, what shows up in Billing, who can self-serve, and how you move the account back to a commercial price later.

This post covers when to use each option. For a shorter version, see Free and complimentary access in the docs.

Start from the relationship, not the amount

Ask four questions before you open the Dashboard:

1. Have they ever paid or trialled? Free trials are only for customers who have never paid and never used a free trial.
2. What should happen when the free access ends? A trial converts to a paid Subscription when a payment method is on file and the customer doesn't cancel. A finite Discount resumes full-price billing automatically. A $0 price stays at $0 until you transition the Subscription.
3. Should they stay on the commercial price? Discounts reduce what you charge. The Subscription price itself stays put. A $0 custom price is their price.
4. Is this a public offer or an exception? Trials and promo codes scale to many customers. Complimentary $0 prices are for a small number of accounts, such as employees, partners, or internal dogfood users.

The answers usually make the right option clear.

Free trials: the conversion path

Use a free trial when someone is evaluating the product and, with a payment method on file, should automatically move to a paid Subscription afterward.

Trials are Plan configuration, not a special Subscription type you create per customer. Turn them on, set the day count, and checkout flows like <PricingTable /> advertise them. Clerk can require a payment method up front (the default), email the customer before the trial ends, and emit subscriptionItem.freeTrialEnding so your own systems can follow up.

A trial is a product setting ("Pro includes 14 days free"), not a one-off support action. Use it for:

• New self-serve signups
• Opt-out trials where card-on-file is part of the funnel
• Experiments on trial length, since the setup is the same across customers

If the user already paid once, they can't start another trial. You can extend an active trial, or use a Discount or complimentary price instead. If you need indefinite employee access, repeatedly extending a trial also requires ongoing manual management.

Read more in Free trials.

100% Discounts: free time on a commercial Subscription

Use a 100% Discount when the customer should remain a normal subscriber at a normal price, and you only want to change what you collect for a while.

Create a percentage Discount at 100, choose how many billing cycles it lasts (or Forever), and apply it to the Subscription Item. Renewals show the Discount. When the cycles run out, full price resumes without another Plan change.

A 100% Discount works well for:

• Goodwill after an outage
• Retention offers ("two free months if you stay")
• Migration grace while someone finishes paying you elsewhere
• Short-term negotiated comps where finance still wants them on the catalog price

Two things to watch for:

• Using "Forever at 100%" for employees. It works, but you've encoded an exception as a Discount that has to survive Plan changes. Transitioning Plan or price clears the Applied Discount, which is easy to miss during a pricing migration.
• Using promo codes for individual comps. Promo codes work well for campaigns. Hand-applied manual Discounts are better when you decide who gets free time.

Read more in Discounts and promo codes.

$0 complimentary prices: access without a commercial price

Use a $0 complimentary custom price when someone should have paid Features without putting them on your public commercial price.

In the Dashboard, open the Subscription Item, choose Change price / Create new price, set monthly and/or annual to $0, and complete the transition. This does not publish a "Free Pro" tier on the Pricing Table. It creates a price for the accounts you move onto it.

This works well for:

• Employees and internal users who need production Feature parity
• Long-lived partner or dogfood accounts
• Cases where Billing should clearly show paid Features with no intent to charge

There are a few tradeoffs:

• Someone has to create the price and transition the Subscription, so it fits exceptions better than every signup.
• Moving off complimentary access later is another price transition back to a commercial price. That is fine for a handful of employees, and noisy if you used it as a stand-in trial for many prospects.
• Paid-to-paid transition timing still applies. Clerk schedules transitions to avoid double-billing or overlapping periods. A $0 target just means the charge is zero until you move them again.

Read more in Custom Plans and prices.

Side-by-side

A simple default policy

If you want a policy your support and success teams can follow:

1. Never paid, evaluating the product → free trial
2. Already subscribing, needs temporary free months → 100% Discount for N cycles
3. Needs ongoing Feature access and should never be a commercial customer → $0 complimentary custom price

Most other cases map to one of these. When you're unsure, pick the option that matches how you want the account to look in six months: converting, back on full price automatically, or clearly marked complimentary.

Where to go next

• Short docs version: Free and complimentary access
• Free trials
• Discounts and promo codes
• Custom Plans and prices