Thank you for being a Blocksy customer! We are doing everything to keep you not just satisfied, but happy with our services. For this reason, we want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck and that’s why our policy is to prorate the plan updates (both upgrades and downgrades).
For those of you who haven’t encountered this term before, prorating is a finance concept which basically means adjusted for a certain time period.
In most cases when a service is prorated, the renewal payment processing time is preserved. If you started your service on the 15th of January and upgraded it on the 27th, your initial date of January 15th would be kept as the billing date.
At Creative Themes, we apply a different logic because we want to be fair to both our business and to our customers. Whether upgrading or downgrading, the cost of the new subscription will be prorated based on what was already paid and how much time is left in the current subscription.
Proration from a subscription package
Changing a subscription (either by upgrading or downgrading the plan) can result in prorated charges for the customer. The best way to illustrate this is by examples:
- If a user purchased a Personal Blocksy Pro license for $49 per year and after 3 months upgrades to the Agency license for $99 per year, the customer will have already used $12.25 (3 out of 12 months or 25%) so the remaining $36.75 will be a prorated discount towards their new subscription. Therefore, they will have to pay $99-$36.75 or $62.25 for the upgrade.
- If a user paid for a $69 per year Professional license on January 15 and then requests a downgrade to the Personal license ($49) on the 15th of July, they will have already paid the $69 while using only half of their billing cycle. In this case, the proration discount would amount to 50% of their initial billing plan (6 months elapsed, 6 months remaining) or $34.50. Consequently, they will only have to pay $14.50 for the Personal license and their next renewal payment will occur on July 15th of the following year.
Proration from a lifetime package
Customers who purchase a lifetime Blocksy Pro subscription will be entitled to a proration discount only if they upgrade their plan within 30 days from purchasing it. The formula to calculate the proration discount is:
Proration discount = the lower value between the Previous Lifetime Subscription Price and the New Lifetime Subscription Price. As such:
- If a customer purchases a Blocksy Pro lifetime Personal license for $149 and 3 days later decides to upgrade to the Professional 5 sites license for $199 they will only be charged $50 for the upgrade.
- If a user purchased a $199 Professional license and within two weeks requests an upgrade to the $299 Agency subscription, they will need to pay $100 for the upgrade.
- In our final example, a customer who purchased a $149 personal license on August 10 but requested an upgrade to the $299 Agency package on November 24 will be charged for the full $299.
Lifetime subscription upgrades can’t be simplified to just a reduction in price. As with all services, certain limits need to be applied in order to protect the system against misuse and ensure the users receive fair service.
To exemplify, here is a common scenario:
User 1 purchases a $149 Blocksy Pro Personal license and takes full use of the service for two years. If they requested an upgrade to the $199 Professional license it means their use of the product, license and support was almost free. This is not sustainable and it would also be unfair to User 2 who buys the same $199 Blocksy Professional license at the same time as User 1. Ultimately, both users pay the same amount, but one of them has already used the service for two years already.
Proration with coupons
When users are updating a plan and at the same time applying a percentage-based coupon, the proration discount will be calculated first and the percentage coupon applied as a final discount to the post-proration discount price.
Blocksy checkout plan update
Customers who update their plan from our website will be presented with the following label on the loaded checkout:
They will have the option to enter their license key and after verification takes place, their purchase will be prorated following the same algorithm.