Introducing Subscriptions Engine & Some Announcements - FluentCart 1.6.0 🔥
This is one of those releases I've been wanting to ship for a long time. And I'm really excited to share it with you finally.
Let me explain why this matters.
Until now, if you wanted to sell subscriptions, your payment gateway had to support it. If it didn't, you were stuck. And the ones that do? They often charge extra for it. That never sat right with me.
With 1.6.0, your store can manage subscriptions on its own. You choose who's in charge - the gateway or your store. Switch to store-managed mode, and FluentCart handles the entire renewal cycle. It creates a renewal order before the due date, emails your customer a payment link, and they pay with whatever gateway you offer. Even cash on delivery. Even bank transfer. Any gateway works now. Automatic charging still available with Stripe, PayPal and other supported payment gateways.
When a charge fails, it doesn't disappear. FluentCart retries on a schedule, emails the customer a link to update their card, and shows you the full retry state in the admin. Failed renewals used to be the silent leak in subscription revenue. Not anymore.
We also shipped a full set of subscription emails - renewal created, payment reminders, upcoming charges, failure alerts, past-due notices. Your customers stay informed at every step.
Subscription management got a serious upgrade. Pause, resume, skip a billing period, reactivate cancelled subscriptions, edit amounts, change schedules, adjust billing dates - all from the admin. Every subscription shows a badge for how it bills. Pro users get an extra bonus: subscriptions paid through Mollie, Authorize.net, or Paddle can automatically upgrade from manual to automatic billing.
Also in this release:
- Elementor blocks now available for free stores
- Better onboarding with clearer step descriptions
- Bricks Products element with empty category toggles
- Storefront styling improvements across the board
- Solid round of fixes and security hardening
What's coming next.
This subscription engine is the foundation for something bigger - complete migration paths from WooCommerce and SureCart. The architecture we shipped in 1.6.0 makes that possible. It's coming.
We also improved the MCP tools recently - advanced order filters, better reporting for your AI agents. If you're using Claude or any AI assistant with FluentCart, the experience just got a lot smarter.
Full release notes: https://fluentcart.com/blog/fluentcart-1-6-0/
The team has been working hard and cooking more 🚀
More awesomeness! Thank you!
Payment solutions like Paddle and Razorpay, do they support this custom subscription engine or are they still managed by them? Or could you please link to a documentation that lists this?
When is your holiday Shahjahan Jewel ? 😂 Seems you and your team aren't having 8 full hours of sleep with these back-to-back releases!
Too good.
Great update. Looking forward to migration and members :)
Congrats ! 👏👏👏
Question, some payment options like SEPA have delayed payment. That is not very handy when used with licenses or course/community access. Is it possible to add an option (on product level) to allow licence activation and community/course access right away, and check again when the payment is actually completed or failed?
Natascha Vantuykom Following this!
I think you can already do so (eg.: Stripe, for example, points you to create a webhook for this). But I am not sure how this should be technically and correctly done tbh!
SEPA could be a bit tricky.
Génial !
Merci
Double yes on this one! 🎉
This is pure awesomeness
I understand this is a great thing, and don’t want to sound ungrateful, but is this perhaps a precursor to membership functionality with fluent community ? That would be just super awesome !
John Waters Hey John. Would you mind please elaborating what are you referring to with membership functionality?
I am just curious :)
John Waters hey John. You probably missed this one. Go to fluentcart.com - go to the menu - click integrations- you'll see that "fluent members" is coming 🙂
John Waters I do community membership like this:
- They buy a FluentCart product,
- FluentCRM automation adds them to a community.
- 365 days later, if they are no longer a member, the automation removes them.
At least I hope that's how it works....I'm only 4 months into this so I wont know for sure for another 8 months😅
It's a bit more complex than that, but that's the essence of it. Are you looking to do something else?
Jorge de los Reyes Trial periods, subscription/member based visibility to taxonomy, and general content, member level based menu visibility etc.
I understand there are ways around this, eg: Roles etc, but a one stop shop would be super awesome
John Waters Okey. Got it!
Thank you for clarifying.
Nicolai already mentioned a pretty usual setup.
So just in case:
- Trials: FluentCart
- Suscription/member based visibility: FluentMembers as Everard Brockett already mentioned, could get into taxonomy or CPT protection. (Personally, I would love to have a native option to create CPTs inside the community... like we already have for /spaces/ or /courses/. But the team could be probably thinking of allowing this from a membership plugin.
- About menu visibility: I also hope this could become something native in Fluent Community. Without the need of an extra plugin 😅
Sounds great, looking forward to looking into this! Congrats Shahjahan Jewel and team!
W big boss 🔥🔥🔥
Please tell me the cancel option is more straightforward with this new release, or is it still buried in the 3 dots on the account->subscription plan->overview page?
Shahjahan Jewel - With the subscription migrations coming, will you add a migration path for ThriveCart as well?
Blaine Moore It really depends on which payment processor you’re using.
If it’s Stripe, migrating away from ThriveCart is actually much easier than many people expect. Since Stripe owns the customer, payment method, and subscription data, you can generally keep the customer IDs, payment method IDs, and transaction history, recreate the subscriptions on the new platform, and simply disable the billing in ThriveCart. It’s not the same as migrating away from a fully closed SaaS platform.
I handled a couple of ThriveCart migrations a few years ago, and I was honestly surprised by how straightforward they were. We didn’t even need dedicated migration tools.
So if you’re using Stripe, I’d be optimistic. It could end up being as simple as exporting the relevant data from Stripe and importing it into FluentCart via CSV.
If you’re using other payment processors through ThriveCart (PayPal, for example), things can become a bit more complicated.
It’s also a good reminder to keep your subscriptions under the same payment processor whenever possible. Besides making future migrations easier, it can also help you qualify for better processing rates as your volume grows (Stripe, for example, offers custom pricing at higher volumes).
Hope that helps! 😄
Jorge de los Reyes - good to know, thanks! We have Stripe and Paypal, across multiple accounts for both, so it's already complicated. (We bought the business in 2022, and it includes another one that was purchased in 2018 which has paypal subscriptions in Confusionsoft (which became Keap and is now something different altogether?) Pretty sure the INfusionsoft ones though are handled in Infusionsoft so can't be migrated since it triggers the billing so we're stuck with that giant bill every month.
My plan is to offer additional payment processors for one-off payments once we switch to FluentCart but subscriptions will stay on Stripe, and that just gives me even more incentive to continue with that plan, so thanks.
My general idea is to setup tags for where people are subscribed and just setup automations to let me know when somebody changes their billing status or setup some sort of automation to check them on a regular basis to know when to migrate folks where necessary.
But...a 1-click migration to grab that info and put it into FluentCart would sure be handy. :)
Blaine Moore There was actually a time when FluentConnect (the official FluentCRM + ThriveCart integration) used to be a thing.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/fluent-connect/
The team is also already familiar with ThriveCart from FluentCart’s development. I’ve previously shared some of ThriveCart’s strongest features that I think would be great additions to FluentCart, so this wouldn’t be the first collaboration between WPMN and ThriveCart. 😄
Let’s stay hopeful! That said, I’ll probably submit a dedicated feature request via a support ticket, since as far as I know, only WooCommerce and SureCart are currently on the roadmap.
I guess it will also depend on how much ThriveCart’s API has evolved over the years, especially since the acquisition. I remember working with it a while back, and it definitely wasn’t the easiest API to integrate with.
Hopefully that chaos is part of the past. Keep us updated if you finally make the request!
Jorge de los Reyes - opened a support ticket, hopefully something will come of it.
One word : Awesome !
Incredible. So if I switch to store mode can I still have the auto billing happen without them manually clicking the payment link? I tried to sort that out from what you said above, but it could kind of read two ways. Or I just need more coffee.
kyler boudreau Hi, existing subscription will continue as their current billing Billing method. Switching to store mode will have effect on new subscriptions. Every subscription is independent for future renewal and it's billing method depends on what was the Subscription Management mode when it created. For more info please check https://docs.fluentcart.com/guide/product-types-creation/store-managed-subscriptions#how-subscription-billing-works-in-fluentcart
AKM Elias thanks. Just checked the doc and here's the part I was after: Store Billing with Auto-Charge: The same store-owned schedule as above, with one addition. FluentCart saves the customer's payment method and attempts to charge it automatically for each renewal, so the customer does not have to pay by hand.
How does FluentCart store the payment info?
kyler boudreau FluentCart don't store customer's card details ourselves — with customer consent, It save a secure token from the payment gateway (Stripe, PayPal, etc.), which actually holds the card data.
For renewals, FluentCart just send that token back to the gateway to charge it.
AKM Elias there we go, that was the missing piece to the puzzle. That makes this AWESOME.
You guys rock! Thanks and keep the great work!
How does this local storage of payment info impact security? Stripe (and other gateways) warn everyone to ensure that they manage payment details to avoid local breaches that release payment info.
Curtis Bingham FluentCart does not store card info locally.
Shahjahan Jewel is payment information not stored or is it stored elsewhere?
Maude Vuille FluentCart does not store the direct payment info. If you use stripe, stripe records those and Fluentcart just store the customer id.
Shahjahan Jewel Amazing work! please don' forget abut divi 5 modules for fluent cart 😀
Everard Brockett wait another week please. Something is coming!
Shahjahan Jewel 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩 Yes sir!
Shahjahan Jewel Please do Cornerstone page builder support after Divi 😀🙏
Very cool update, I would love to see a migration tool to move subscriptions created with FluentForms over to this new subscription engine.
Mike Rads I will add to the request, the Fluent Forms + FluentCart integration.
Would be awesome to be able to use all the calculation features, but charge through fluentcart!
This is excellent news. Thank you for the development. Question I have is that I moved to fluent cart away from Keap because they lock you into using their platform for renewing a subscription. Will this new subscription engine allow the subscription to stay in Stripe as a subscription item in the customer area of Stripe, which would allow us to move away from fluentcart in the future, but retain our subscriptions?
Not that I have any plan on moving away from fluent cart but I want to go into this eyes wide open. Thanks again for all the development.
Willie Myette So this subscription engine feature is mainly for the people who don't want to manage their subscriptions in the payment gateway (or where the regional payment gateways does not support subscriptions). By default and we recommend to use subscriptions in the payment gateways (stripe billing).
So nothing got changed with the automatic billing for subscriptions with stripe or paypal. We just added this new subscription engine so if someone wants to use them they can easily switch.
We don't want to lock anyone out of our products. We build fully open solutions, and we belive customers should have choice to move to new solutions if that fits better for them.
Perfect thank you. So if using Stripe and PayPal only there is no need to switch to subscription engine.
If we did use the subscription engine would FC be required to process those subscriptions, meaning if FC is no longer in the picture, do those subscriptions no longer process?
I like the idea of the engine but want to make sure the sub still remains active in Stripe/PP regardless of FC. Hope what I’m asking makes sense!
Willie Myette We recommend to use the Auto Subscription in payment gateway and which is default. So even if uninstall FluentCart the subscriptions will run on the payment gateway. The new engine is a opt-in feature. Not default.
Just curious. Will all this new stack of emails substitute the payment processor ones? (Eg.: Stripe’s emails). Just wanted to know if the customer will be receiving duplicate emails regarding the same issues 😄.
I raise the question for both cases: (A) you keep automatic with the processor ; (B) you set the new engine.
Perfect. Thanks again for the update.
Yes we are waiting for Woo migration.
"your store can manage subscriptions on its own"
Does that mean that the subscription is simply a repeating invoice, and the client has to pay manually?
Or does FluentCart automatically charge the customer's card through stored and tokenised card details at the payment processor like Stripe?
The latter is best.
Which is how WHMCS works - avoiding Stripe's own additional fees for handling subscriptions.
Dominic Osborne We added both feature
- Automatic - FluentCart create subscription in the payment gateway, payment gateways handle those and FluentCart record those
- Store Managed - FluentCart create recurrinng invoices and try to charge automatically via the gateway's saved payment method
- Manual - FluentCart will create the invoices but customers or you have to take action to pay the recurring invoice.
Shahjahan Jewel super excited about this last option. Cuts sending reminders, etc but still pay via bank transfers, good for local businesses
Damn, I know users will be happy about this one. And super with the 3 charge methods you built into this.
This could make migration a lot easier, would there be any change to upload a CSV with customer data, the product/name, price and interval? This way I could migratie all my customers to Fluent and will use the manual feature.