Offering payment plans makes it easier for your customers to afford your products by letting them pay smaller installments over time, rather than in one lump sum.

Introduction

Offering payment plans lets you divide the cost of your products into automatic monthly payments.

For instance, instead of charging $600 in one lump sum payment, you can create a payment plan that allows customers to pay $200 per month over three months.

This option lowers the initial payment and provides a more convenient way for customers to manage a larger purchase over time.

Here are some some things to keep in mind before setting up payment plans:

These payments are charged to the user’s credit card on their monthly billing date
- A user’s monthly billing date is determined by the date they enrolled in your product
Billing will stop once the total number of months you selected for the payment plan has been completed
There are risks involved with setting up a payment plan (one-time credit cards, insufficient funds, customers not paying etc).
- You can learn more about how to manage and retry failed payment plans in this article

Setting up payment plans

Here's how to set up payment plans for your product:

From your Podia dashboard, click on Products in the sidebar menu.
Click on Edit next to the product you want to set up a payment plan for.
Once inside the product, navigate to the Pricing tab.
Click on Edit to edit the offer of your product.
Click on the Payment plan option to enable it for your product.
Set the installment amount and the number of months you’d like the payment plan to run.

On the right, you’ll see the total price you’ve set for your product. It doesn’t need to match the single payment price.
- You can choose to offer just a payment plan, or provide both options, allowing customers to pay in full or through installments.
Click Save to save your pricing changes.

FAQs

What will customers see when they select the payment plan option?

Here's what it looks like on your sales page:

If you’ve set up both single payment and payment plan options, they’ll be able to choose their preferred option during checkout.

Here's what it looks like for your customers during checkout:

If I change the price of an payment plan, will that impact existing customers?

No. Changing the price of a product will only impact new customers.

Current customers - including the ones with an active payment plan - won't be affected.

How do coupons work with payment plans?

The discount will be spread out over each number of months. To illustrate:

Total price before coupon: $200
- The payment plan without the coupon for 4 payments: $50 each month
The total price of the product with coupon: $100
- The payment plan with the coupon for 4 payments: $25 each month

How do failed charges get retried?

We retry the customer's card on file 3 times, 3 days in a row. If the charge fails after the third attempt, their subscription is canceled.

It is up to you if you'd like to remove them from the product or retry the charge after it is canceled.

The reason that we don't automatically remove them is that we want to leave that up to you. It could be that they've paid 11 out of 12 payments and you want to let the 12th payment slide.