# Contract Terms for Plans

You can add contract terms to your plans with minimum commitments and grace cancellation periods. The main use of this feature is to allow you to enforce minimum commitment terms on your service(s) and prevent a customer from cancelling within a certain period. Grace cancellation provides a window of time where a customer can cancel without incurring any cancellation fees, for example. This might look like a 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee.

Minimum commitments allow you to create interesting offers that benefit you and your customers for the long term.

## Configuring Contract Terms on a Plan

When contract terms are enabled for your project, you will get two additional settings when configuring a plan: **Minimum commitment** and **Grace cancellation**. You can toggle these on/off independently, and you can set the various timescales in days, weeks, months, or years. These values can currently always be modified, even if the current plan already has subscribers.

![Contract terms configuration on a plan](https://placehold.co/800x400?text=Plan+Contract+Terms+Configuration)

### Cancellation and Contract Terms

When a customer signs up for a plan with a **6-month commitment**, they will not be able to cancel their subscription within that period **after their subscription is activated**. Only someone from your team will be able to **force cancel** a committed contract during this period.

Your customer can cancel their subscription(s) at any moment within the grace cancellation period (see below) or at any moment outside of their commitment.

> **Please note:** Customers become eligible to cancel their subscription(s) 2 weeks prior to the end of their minimum commitment period to provide a "cancellation window" before the next billing cycle.

### The Grace Cancellation Period

The grace cancellation period is used to allow for offering various types of return policies or sales guarantees. For example, if you want to offer a **30-day money-back guarantee** or are required to offer a **right of withdrawal** according to local e-commerce legislation.

### Cancellation via Customer Self Service Center

Our Customer Self Service Center also takes any contract terms of your customer into account. So if you're using our built-in Self Service Center, you're already set from the get-go.

On the dashboard overview, we display until when your customer is committed to their current plan and when their grace cancellation period ends. On the cancellation page, we inform your customer when they are eligible for cancellation again.

> *Firmhouse does not automatically refund payments for cancellations whether made during the grace cancellation period or during a regular commitment period.*

### Viewing a Customer's Contract Details

You can view a customer's current contract details in an updated **Active plan** section of the Subscription detail page.

![Customer contract details in Active plan section](https://placehold.co/800x400?text=Customer+Contract+Details)

## Frequently Asked Questions

### When do contract terms get applied and when does a term start?

Contract terms are stored as soon as a subscriber signs up. However, the actual term only starts once the subscriber is **activated**.

### Does the minimum commitment timeline start after the grace cancellation period has ended?

No, minimum commitment and grace cancellation periods are independent from one another and their timelines both start at the moment of customer activation. For example, if you set up contract terms for your plan with a minimum commitment of 1 year and a grace cancellation period of 2 months, your customers would be eligible to cancel their subscription for the first 2 months and then not for 10 months after that.

### Do changes in Plan contract terms apply to existing subscribers?

At the moment, you can disable/enable or modify the plan's configured contract terms at any time. The changes will then only be applied to **new** subscribers signing up.

### Does switching plans affect contract terms?

If you manually switch a customer's plan, their terms won't change and will continue as they would if you didn't switch the Plan.
