What open source subscription billing has to handle
A subscription is rarely static. Customers move up a plan, move down, suspend for three months, swap a device, cancel mid-cycle and come back. Most billing systems handle the first purchase well and everything afterwards badly.
OpenBRM treats the whole lifecycle as first-class. Every operation around a customer's subscription is a supported action with a defined effect on the next invoice: change plan, upgrade, downgrade, cancel, activate and inactivate. Each carries a provisioning hook, so the change can be pushed to your network or platform at the same moment it is recorded for billing.
Operations you get out of the box
- Change plan, upgrade and downgrade, with proration handled on the next billing run
- Activate and inactivate, each with its own provisioning hook
- Cancellation, including mid-cycle cancellation and end-of-period cancellation
- Link a device to a subscription, or swap the associated device without re-creating the order
- Manage bundled credits — included minutes, data or units that reset on the customer's own cycle
Billing cycles that follow the customer
Each customer bills on their own cycle rather than on a single company-wide run. The billing process picks up recurring subscription charges, one-off charges, pre-paid balances and rated usage, and combines them onto a single invoice for that customer's period. Invoice numbering, collections and dunning are configurable rather than hard-coded.
That matters when you run mixed business models — a customer on a monthly broadband plan with a one-off installation fee and metered overage should receive one invoice, not three.
Provisioning without a middleware layer
Because the provisioning hooks are part of the subscription operations themselves, there is no separate orchestration layer to keep in sync. A downgrade recorded in OpenBRM is the same event that tells your platform to change the customer's service level. For teams that have run a billing system and a provisioning system side by side, this removes an entire class of reconciliation bug.
Where to go next
Subscription charges, rated usage and one-off fees land on the same invoice, so the subscription manager is part of a complete open source billing platform and open source invoicing platform rather than a bolt-on. The billing process, invoice numbering and collections configuration are all covered in the documentation. If you need behaviour that is specific to your business, the plug-in system lets you replace the relevant step rather than fork the product.
Billing process documentation · Plug-in system · Product bundling
Subscription management is one layer of OpenBRM's open source BSS. Comparing platforms? Read OpenBRM vs Oracle BRM.