Braintree API Update Subscription - paypal

Question

The Braintree API docs aren't entirely clear on a few things dealing with subscriptions.
We're building a system with multiple subscription tiers and want to give the user the ability to change tiers at any time. Updating the subscription is easy enough, and we've enabled prorated billing (though we're still not entirely clear on what Braintree is doing under the hood there).
The part I'm not seeing is how to update the price. If I change the plan id, the price does not change. I would expect the subscription to use the new plan's price - I can't imagine when it would ever make sense to not update the price. I see that I can pass a new price along with a new plan id, so I can update the price in the same call that I update the plan, but this means I have to store the price in my code as well as in Braintree. I know I can call the plans on Braintree to get the price information, but it should not be necessary to add the overhead of an additional API call.
Am I overlooking something? Is there really not a way to tell Braintree to use the price of the new subscription?

Answer 1

I am a developer at Braintree. Our plans are templates that are used to populate the subscription when it is created.
From our docs:
A plan is a template for your subscriptions: when you create a plan, it will be used to populate the following attributes when a new subscription is created:
plan name
description
trial period
billing day of month
number of billing cycles
amount
currency
billing cycle
Additionally our subscriptions do not inherit a new plan's price when updated
If you update the subscription's plan, the subscription will not inherit the new plan's price.
We implemented plans as templates so that merchants can safely update a plan without affecting subscriptions with existing customers.
We try to not make any assumptions about the state of a subscription when the plan id has changed to prevent its values from being changed unexpectedly. There is not a solution at this time to inherit select properties from a plan when changing a plan's subscription.

Answer 2

Since there is no language tag to this question, I'll use PHP.
If your customer changes subscription, what you have to do is update his current subscription in Braintree to the new plan AND set the new price of the plan too in that call.
Basically plans in Braintree are just templates (as said by pblesi). You can override any value you want. You can in theory create a $1/month plan called tiny in Braintree, but in your code subscribe the user to the tiny plan with a $500/month subscription price.
I think (guessing from here on) that Braintree just provides this system so people can add plans to their apps/websites without updating any code, because you can query all existing Braintree plans on your account and populate your GUI with their contents. If you implement something like this you can add plans later on and they will automatically appear on your site/app. On the other hand you can edit the price for existing plans on their site and it would only impact new subscribers as old customers will keep on paying the old price.
Now for the code, in PHP:
First I create a subscription:
Braintree_Subscription::create([
'paymentMethodToken' => $paymentMethodToken,
'planId' => $planId,
'price' => $price
]);
Price is just a number, the currency depends on your account configuration
Imagine my user changes his subscription on the website, I can update his subscription as follows:
Braintree_Subscription::update($subscriptionId,[
'planId' => $planId,
'price' => $price
]);
where $subscriptionId is the ID of the subscription you created when he/she first signed up (to be stored somewhere with the user info in your db for instance), $planId is the new plan and $price is the price of the new plan.
I've just implemented support for Braintree myself, and indeed, the user manual isn't always very clear, but once you know how it works it's actually a very easy system to use. A lot easier than PayPal recurring billing, for that matter.