Overview
The Subscription Service manages the full lifecycle of recurring product subscriptions on the Equinox platform: creating subscriptions, scheduling and processing recurring deliveries (instances/orders), pausing/resuming/cancelling, managing the items inside a subscription, and specialized flavours of subscription — gift subscriptions, prepaid subscriptions, and product swaps. It also stores per-user global preferences (e.g. preferred order-processing day) and multi-tenant instance configuration/attributes.
It is a multi-tenant service: nearly every operation is scoped by an instanceId (a tenant/brand instance), and tenant behaviour can be extended via a plugin/extension mechanism and marketplace integration.
Business Value
| Capability | Business value |
|---|---|
| Recurring subscriptions | Predictable recurring revenue and automated re-ordering for customers |
| Pause / resume / skip | Reduces churn by letting customers pause instead of cancel; enforces fair-use limits |
| Gift subscriptions | New acquisition channel; redemption codes, fraud/velocity limits, high-value review |
| Prepaid subscriptions | Upfront cash collection; fixed-term plans with renewal and convert-to-recurring |
| Product swap | Lets customers change products between deliveries without cancelling |
| Bulk operations | Operational efficiency for admins managing many subscriptions/instances |
| Multi-tenant instances + attributes | One deployment serves many brands/tenants with per-tenant config |
Who Uses It
| Consumer | How they use it |
|---|---|
| Storefront / customer app | Create/manage subscriptions, pause/skip, gifting, swaps (via authenticated APIs) |
| Admin / operations tooling | Bulk operations, process summaries, transaction audit, instance/attribute config |
| Cart Service | Called by this service during renewal to build a cart and checkout |
| Marketplace Service | App lifecycle events (app.*) consumed via EventBridge/SQS to install/enable tenant extensions |
| Downstream consumers | Subscribe to EventBridge domain events (subscriptionCreated, instanceCompleted, etc.) |
Core Features
| # | Feature | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Subscription CRUD | Create, read, update, list, cancel subscriptions |
| 2 | Recurring instances (orders) | Scheduled delivery instances with retry/skip/process |
| 3 | Renewal orchestration | Builds a virtual cart and checks out via Cart Service |
| 4 | Items management | Add/update/remove items, item-level intervals, skip flags |
| 5 | User preferences | Order-processing date, freeze/notification dates, threshold gating |
| 6 | Bulk operations | Bulk create, bulk update/delete by user, bulk instance actions |
| 7 | Instances & attributes | Multi-tenant instance config + attribute schema definitions |
| 8 | Process summaries & transactions | Audit trail of batch-processing runs and instance transactions |
| 9 | Domain-event publishing | 40+ EventBridge event types across the domain |
Related Resources
- Cart Service — invoked during renewal to build a virtual cart and check out
- Marketplace Service — supplies app-lifecycle events that install/enable tenant extensions
- Auth (AWS Cognito) — issues the JWT Bearer tokens validated on every protected route
Revision History
2026-08-05 | JP – Created the page and added the content.