We need to set up a plan that splits payments over 3 months

The plan, when all payments have been made, lasts for 3 years. I am not sure how to accomplish this.

I set up:

First amount and period: Different
First payment price: $997
Inital Validity duration: 1 month

Regular Plan and Validity
Regular price of plan $997, Regular Validity duration: 1 month,
Total number of occurrences of regular validity: 2

None of these appear to allow me to set the expiration for the plan at 3 years. How can I achieve the result intended which is pretty simple, Total Price $2,991.00 paid in 3 equal monthly installments that when paid, gives them a 3 year subscription?

Thanks for the help!

There's no built in functionality for installment payments. You'd need to just do a month by month plan or use Stripe Checkout or PayPal and they can do installments through them (e.g. PayPal Credit).

paid in 3 equal monthly installments that when paid, gives them a 3 year subscription?

It might be possible to do this with CB Auto Actions. Basically it'd be a month by month plan and after the 3rd month move them into a different plan with your 3 year duration - 3 months.

So you'd first setup your plan however you wanted then make a copy of it and set its duration accordingly (3 years). It'll then get a bit more complicated from there setting up cancelling of the previous subscription on the third renewal and creating the new subscription for the 3 year plan, but it's doable.

I don't typically recommend extending lines of credit to users though. Letting payment processors handle the installment payments or the user themselves via credit cards is generally a much safer option for you.

Thanks for the information and a solution with PayPal. Having an option like this would be a good feature to add.
It should be up to us business owners to decide if we want to risk a failure to pay, in our case the downside is negligible and it's not an issue. From a marketing standpoint, a pay over time feature directly from us, the seller would remove friction from the sale.

Something to think about for the future...

Anyway, thank you for the thorough explanation and suggestions.

It's possible to do this via CB Auto Actions if you still need this, but it requires a 2 plan setup to accomplish. Basically you'd have 1 plan that lets them pay in installments and another plan that lets them pay all at once. The installment plan after 3 months would be cancelled by CB Auto Actions and move them to the all at once plan. I can try to provide some instruction on how to do this if you're interested.

The reason we've no out of box solution for this is because installment plans are basically just a recurring payment as far as payment processors are concerned and right now all our recurring payments are handled by the payment processor. Their subscription systems don't really have a decent way of doing this.

In a future CBSubs release we'll be moving to token based billing. Token billing would make CBSubs responsible for the recurring payments and would let us have whatever billing cycles you could imagine as we'd get to set when the recurring payment would happen, but right now that'd be a complete rewrite of how CBSubs handles recurring billing so we don't want to take such risks until after CB 3.x. Several payment providers don't allow for this though so it would limit what payment providers we can use for recurring payments in the future (both Stripe and PayPal support it!).

Fantastic, looking forward to the next iteration of CB and CBSubs, they are the bedrock of my system now. Love the new flexibility and features you all have planned. Appreciate your fast response too!