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Question

User charged by Apple despite subscribing to a product with a free trial

  • April 15, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 15 views

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Hey RC team,

We recently had a problem where an Apple user signed-up to our App for the first time and subscribed to a product with a free trial. Unexpectedly, they were charged the full amount right away. Our App only offers auto-renewable subscriptions to users.

I have checked in RC’s Customer History for that user as well as our own logs to see if the user’s trial eligibility was incorrectly determined and they were misguided by our App’s UI that they were eligible for a trial, but doesn’t seems to be the case.

RC shows in the Customer History that the user started a trial and also shows 0 revenue reported. We even asked the user to provide us with a screenshot of the subscription details of our App in their Purchase History through their Apple Account. That also shows that the user was subscribed to a free period which will be renewed after X number of days.

We would appreciate if you could tell us what could’ve happened here? I will be happy to share the AppUserId if need be.

1 reply

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This can be ignored as we found a lead into why it happened. If my conclusion is incorrect, please feel free to correct me.

We allow users to purchase subscriptions via Stripe via a third party Web Funnel as part of a marketing campaign. The user was able to purchase a subscription through it but the Web Funnel was unable to sync it to RC with the correct app_user_id and instead synced it with a randomly generated ID.

Later, when the user logged-in to our app, because the subscription wasn’t synced to RC with the correct app_user_id earlier, the SDK returned no information about the existing subscription and the user was able to purchase a trial (rightfully so as how would RC know if a subscription synced with another randomly generated ID belongs to the user who signed in).