Grace period

A subscriber is midway through a season when the monthly renewal declines. With a billing grace period in effect, the episode keeps playing and the app keeps treating that person as entitled while the store retries the charge. Without one, the next session opens on a paywall, and a subscriber who never chose to leave is handled exactly like one who did.

Grace periods are a store-side setting, and every store defines its own allowed lengths and its own default. A publisher running on several stores at once is running several different windows at once, with no single expiry date to reason about. Grace period is also a different state from account hold: during grace the subscriber still has access, during hold the store has suspended it. An app that collapses both into “not subscribed” will lock out people the store still counts as subscribers.

The window exists to buy time, and the only worthwhile thing to spend it on is telling the subscriber. This is the one stretch of a lapse where the person is still inside the product, still watching, and can be shown on the screen in front of them that a card needs updating. Subscription state arrives through the SDK; the screens that respond to it get designed and shipped from the platform, which is also where dunning picks up. Ignore the window and it closes on its own, quietly, and the result is filed as involuntary churn.