Creating & Managing Coupons

Overview

Coupons let you offer discounts to your customers. Inflow supports two kinds of coupons:

• One-time coupons — discounts applied to one-time (single) payments.
• Subscription coupons — discounts applied to subscriptions (the first payment and, depending on the coupon's duration, the following billing cycles).

All coupons are created and managed exclusively from the Merchant Dashboard — there are no API endpoints for coupon CRUD operations. Applying a coupon to a payment, however, is done through the API — see Applying Coupons.

Creating a Coupon (Dashboard Only)

1. Go to Coupons in your Merchant Dashboard.
2. Click Create Coupon.
3. Choose the coupon type (one-time or subscription) and fill in the details:
   • Code — the discount code customers will use (e.g., SUMMER20)
   • Discount Type — percentage (1–100%) or fixed amount
   • Discount Value — the discount amount (e.g., 20% or €5.00)
   • Usage Limits — optional maximum number of uses
   • Expiration — optional expiration date
4. Click Create.

Making a payment free with a 100% coupon. Percentage coupons go up to 100%, which makes the payment completely free. On a subscription, a 100% coupon makes the first payment free (or more cycles, depending on the coupon's duration). If what you want is a free trial period instead — card collected, first charge only after the trial — see Free Trial & Card Setup.

One-Time Coupons

One-time coupons apply to single payments. From the Dashboard you can fully manage them:

Subscription Coupons

Subscription coupons apply to subscription payments. They behave slightly differently from one-time coupons:

• They can only be activated or deactivated. Unlike one-time coupons, their other fields cannot be edited after creation. To change a discount value, duration, or restriction, deactivate the coupon and create a new one.
• Target specific customers or restrict to new customers only with promotion codes. You can attach one or more promotion codes to a subscription coupon to control who can redeem it, if it can only be redeemed by first-time customers.
• No promotion code needed for open coupons. If you don't need targeting, customers can simply use the coupon's own code (not a promotion code) — exactly like one-time coupons.

How Coupons Are Applied

A coupon is always applied to a payment that has already been created:

1. Validation — the code is checked (exists, active, not expired, usage limit not reached, and applicable to the payment).
2. Application — the discount is applied, and the payment amount reflects the discounted price.
3. Payment — the customer is charged the discounted amount.

For hosted checkout pages and payment/subscription links, this happens automatically when the customer enters a code. For SDK / server-to-server integrations, you apply the coupon server-to-server (private key) through the API — see Applying Coupons.

Important Notes

• Coupon creation and management (create, edit, activate/deactivate) is Dashboard-only.
• Subscription coupons can only be activated or deactivated — no other edits are possible after creation.
• One-time coupons apply to one-time payments; subscription coupons apply to subscriptions.
• The discount is applied at payment time — the charged amount reflects the discounted price.
• Coupon usage is tracked automatically.