Subscriptions and recurring billing for Saudi businesses

How a subscription starts

You create a subscription with a description, an amount and a cycle length, which gives you a link like paywithnal.com/subscribe/8fk2ma to send to the customer. They pay the first payment and explicitly agree to the automatic renewal on the same page.

Once that first payment succeeds the card is saved at the gateway as a token, and the subscription becomes active. The token is all we keep, along with a short description of the card — network, last four digits, expiry. The full card number never reaches Nalpay.

The customer's consent is recorded with its timestamp and the version of the text they agreed to, because recurring collection rests on a mandate, and a mandate has to be evidenced rather than assumed.

Cycles are days, not a day of the month

A cycle is a number of days: 30, 90, 180 or 365. Each period begins that many days after the one before it.

That is deliberate. Tying renewal to a day of the month makes “the 31st” nonexistent for half the year and gives every month its own exception. Counting in days means every renewal date can be worked out in advance, by the merchant and the customer alike.

What happens at renewal

• On the cycle date the amount is charged to the saved card automatically and appears as a new payment in your ledger.
• When a charge fails — insufficient funds, an expired card — it is retried on a schedule rather than given up on at the first decline.
• If the retries are exhausted the subscription becomes past due. It is not cancelled immediately; there is a grace period first.
• A past-due subscription has a recovery link you can send so the customer can pay the overdue cycle or update their card without the subscription being recreated.
• Either you or the customer can cancel at any time, and the cycles before the cancellation stay in the record exactly as they were.

A subscription has two sides

A subscription is an agreement, and it survives when both sides understand it. Make the description say what renews and how often, and keep cancelling easy — an easy exit is what makes the entrance untroubled.

On your side: check the subscriptions page for the past-due ones and reach out. Nalpay does not send automatic WhatsApp or email reminders today, so that step stays a human decision, with the recovery link ready to copy.

Before you start

• Which cards can be charged on a recurring basis differs by network, and the subscribe page shows what is available at the time of payment.
• Each cycle costs what an ordinary payment costs: the network rate, the anti-fraud fee, and VAT on both.
• Run the whole cycle in test mode — subscribe, renew, fail, recover — before your account goes live.