early adopters, free time

in our app, we aren't going to be using free trial periods. But I do have some early adopters that I want to give them, say, 6 months of free access before it auto-converts them to paying.

Now, one way to do it to give them the Free plan, and then somehow remember to remove that plan 6 months from now. Even so, they'd end up experiencing "no subscription plan in place" at that time, rather than a "your subscription has expired" experience.

Or, is there a way to set them up with a regular monthly plan and then add 6 months free trial to it .... just for them?  it seems like overkill to have to create another plan both locally and on Stripe just for a small handful of exceptions to the rule.  It's unclear if I set `trial_ends_at`  by hand in the DB to their plan whether that's sufficient -- or if that field is being populated by Stripe and therefore not the correct place to set it.

Looking ahead a bit, I can just imagine our CEO walking in and saying "oh, yeah ABC Inc I agreed to let them have 7 months free , not 6". If I can set this easily then small indulgences like this are not stressful

advice?

Pay supports "generic" trials which are trials without a card required. Those don't require a payment method and are just stored in your db. Then you can check if that generic trial has expired and prompt the user to subscribe. https://github.com/pay-rails/pay#generic-trials

You can also do a trial in Stripe, but I believe they will require a payment method on file to do that.

I plan to do the same thing but I haven't gotten to it yet... but was thinking I would use a stripe coupon in stripe -> products -> coupons. Is that what you're looking for? Just create a coupon with 100% off for 6 months. Not sure whether extending the coupon to a 7th month after the fact (in stripe) but maybe?

I think Chris' generic trial is what I was searching for, since it doesn't require a CC and, even better, I can set it up without involving stripe