subscription.activated
A paid subscription is acquired. Fires once, at first activation.
When this fires
On the first successful payment for a subscription, across every payment provider: Stripe, PayPal, Paystack, Razorpay, Skrill, CeyPay, and CoinPayments. It covers both recurring subscriptions and one-time (non-recurring) passes.
It fires once per subscription, at acquisition. It is not a general "became active" signal:
| Transition | Event actually emitted |
|---|---|
| First paid checkout | subscription.activated |
| Recurring renewal charge | subscription.renewed |
| Paused → resumed | subscription.unpaused |
Cancelled → reinstated before ends_at | subscription.reactivated |
| Past-due → collected | subscription.renewed |
| Trial → paying | member.converted |
| Access code / cardless trial | subscription.created |
A Stripe subscription that begins in a trial still emits subscription.activated at acquisition, because the provider creates the subscription at that moment. The later trial-to-paid transition emits member.converted only.
This is the paid-acquisition event. If you only subscribe to one subscription event for a paying audience, subscribe to this one, not
subscription.created, which never fires for paid checkouts.
data.provider is never access_code on this event; code redemptions emit subscription.created instead.
Caveats
- Once per subscription. Stripe and PayPal de-duplicate with a persistent guard key; the remaining providers emit only on the non-renewal branch of their payment handler. Renewals never re-emit it.
- To capture every acquisition path (paid, comped code, and cardless trial) subscribe to both
subscription.activatedandsubscription.created, then de-duplicate ondata.subscription_id. - Paid acquisitions do not emit
member.joined. That event is access-code-only. Usesubscription.activatedas the paid-audience join signal. payment.succeededfires for the same charge and carries the amount, currency, and external payment id, which this event does not.- The
POST /v1/webhook-endpoints/{endpoint}/testendpoint sends a syntheticsubscription.createdpayload, neversubscription.activated. Testing an endpoint does not exercise this event.
Related events
subscription.created: the zero-payment acquisition equivalent.payment.succeeded: the charge behind this activation.subscription.renewed: every subsequent cycle.member.converted: trial-to-paying transition.
Ability to subscribe
A token needs this to subscribe an endpoint to the event.
Header Parameters
t=<unix seconds>,v1=<hex>: the HMAC-SHA256 of "<t>.<raw body>" under the endpoint's secret. Verify it before acting, and refuse a t more than 300 seconds from now. During a secret rotation a v0= signature under the previous secret may precede v1=.
The event's ULID, bare. The envelope's id is the same ULID prefixed evt_, so strip the prefix before comparing. Deduplicate on it: a retry carries the same id.
The event name, the same as the envelope's type.
Always application/json.
Always Subscriby-Webhooks/1.0.
Payload
JSONWhat Subscriby posts to your endpointapplication/json
The signed JSON envelope posted to your endpoint.
The envelope every event is delivered in.
Responses
2XXAny success status
Your endpoint acknowledged the delivery. Any 2xx status within 30 seconds marks it delivered; the response body is ignored.
defaultAny other status
Any other status, a connection failure, or no answer within 30 seconds counts as a failed attempt. The delivery is retried 8 times, after 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 1 hour, 6 hours, 1 day, 3 days; the last failure dead-letters it, and it can be retried from the dashboard or POST /v1/webhook-deliveries/{delivery}/retry. After 20 consecutive failures the endpoint is paused until it is resumed.
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