My renewal is in 3 days. I figured I'd ask about the best way to upgrade that isn't likely to cause some kind of weirdness. I'd like to bump to the $50 level this year, since I can afford it, but would like to avoid issues with my bank's slightly hyperactive fraud department, which freaks out about multiple transactions that don't occur very often. My thought is disabling autorenew and then manually do the next level but figured I'd check if I'm missing something obvious here.
Subscription upgrade/renewal question
- Thread starter Nilt
- Start date
I just put it through directly before hand when I upgraded. It all seemed to JustWork
First off, thanks for thinking of us like that. 
Secondly ... I think your plan might be best. Normally you can just upgrade, and I think it prorates things. But since it's going to renew in now 2 days that will probably not work, I'm not sure how the charges would work. If it doesn't break it might do some weird fraction that would probably freak out your bank lol.
You could in normal circumstances just upgrade after it renews and it would work fine. But that will be two separate charges, and that seems to be what you're concerned about.
So yeah, just do your plan is probably the easiest. And if anything goes wrong we'll just fix it, so don't stress about it.
Secondly ... I think your plan might be best. Normally you can just upgrade, and I think it prorates things. But since it's going to renew in now 2 days that will probably not work, I'm not sure how the charges would work. If it doesn't break it might do some weird fraction that would probably freak out your bank lol.
You could in normal circumstances just upgrade after it renews and it would work fine. But that will be two separate charges, and that seems to be what you're concerned about.
So yeah, just do your plan is probably the easiest. And if anything goes wrong we'll just fix it, so don't stress about it.
My bank choked on the tiny pro rata as well. I just waited until after the regular renewal to upgrade to plus.
Yeah, it might try and charge $0.27 to a card or something, assuming it didn't just give up on trying.
At the time I was thinking to myself it would be handy if there was a way for the system to make a note that I wanted to upgrade, and it just runs out the clock on the current subscription and upgrades/renews together. Then there would be no penny charges.
If it is within, say, a week, maybe just comp them the ++ level until the renewal date. (This is one of those things that's easy to say but can be kind of tricky to implement though.)
Our current sub system is really run on the back of a store, so it doesn't have some of the more advanced bells and whistles a dedicated subscription system might. That would be handy though for sure.
That was mainly what I was worried about, yeah. I sort of get it but for crying out loud, they got pissy when I bought ebooks from Amazon not too long ago, which I do pretty regularly. Unfortunately, the fraud department seemed unaware there's no easy way to just add books to a cart on Amazon any more so one can purchase them all at once.
Anyhow, I toggled auto-renew off for now. And, yes, Ars is well worth supporting. It's one of very few places online I feel that way about, in fact.