I’ve made a subscription plan for customers to pay $9.99/month for as long as they have the subscription. That was all fine and easy, but I’d like to make it to where users can save $20 a year if they go a year’s length in their subscription, thus making it around $100/year instead of $120/year. I’ve tried this by using phases when upserting a catalog object for a subscription plan. The first phase would be charged monthly at $9.99 for 12 periods, and then the second phase would be set at an annual cadence to give back $20. Even though the tool tip that explains the “amount” field under “recurring_price_money” says it can be an integer that is positive or negative, an error comes back saying it must be non-negative after entering the value “-2000”.
I’ve marked this as a feature request, since it doesn’t seem there is a way to implement the functionality I spelled out as of now. The only workaround I can think of at the moment is to make a huge number of phases that charge $9.99 at a monthly cadence for 10 periods, following by another phase that is free for two months. However, a user wouldn’t be going a year’s distance to reach the benefit of a cheaper annual subscription, and this is definitely not the way to create logic in a programming world; it would need to repeat/loop for every year.
Your right, there isn’t a way to issue a discount after they’ve gone the entire 12 months for a specific amount. Have you thought about discounting the new year your billing for so the total for the current year would be $100. Then if they continue the subscription to the next year they’ll continue to get the discounted price for the entirety of the subscription?
We’re constantly working to improve our features based on feedback like this, so I’ll be sure to share your request to the API product team. 
Hi Bryan, and thanks for the quick response. I ended up deciding to charge users $9.99/month for the first 12 months, then $8.33/month for as long as the subscription lasts after that. The API is limited to 2 phases per subscription plan; otherwise I would have done 3, that being $9.99 for 10 months, followed by 2 months free, and then $8.33/month indefinitely. However, it would still be useful to have the discounted feature I requested, although it’s definitely not a hot priority for my project.
You can have more then 2 phases in a plan. What errors were you getting when testing?
I was able to make a subscription plan with more than 2 phases, but it wouldn’t let me swap the plan for users with old subscription plans to the new one. I’m pretty sure that’s when the error came back, but I’m not certain. So maybe it’s just for swapping plans that the rule happens.
You should be able to swap a plan regardless of the phases. I’m curious to know what the error you got. What’s you application ID?