Subscription vs recurring payments confusion

[sandervanhooft]

While working on Laravel Cashier, I notice that the distinction between Subscriptions and Recurring Payments is not clear.

I am not sure when to choose what, and what the limitations/consequences will be, both short term and long term. When talking to Mollie representatives, I get a different response each time.

Perhaps this can be clarified further in the docs?

At the moment, I am not entirely sure what Subscriptions really offer on top of Recurring Payments.

A few things I noticed:

• subscription can be updated, payment not
• subscriptions offer nice separate dashboard features, so it's easy to see what revenue is recurring
• subscriptions do not offer metadata
• payment offers metadata, but I'm not sure it carries over to subsequent payments
• I'm not sure what happens when Mollie decides to cancel a subscription (webhook?) i.e. after a customer complaint
• retrieving past subscription's payments is complex right now (it's on backlog)
• getting upcoming "payment date" is impossible right now for both payment and subscription (it's on backlog for subscription)