Concepts & Strategy

Product lifecycle and archival semantics

Products in Paid follow a soft-archival lifecycle. Archiving a product hides it from places where you would set up something new — product pickers, listings, onboarding flows — but it does not invalidate existing references to that product. Customers who already have an order or subscription for an archived product continue to bill normally.

What archiving a product means

Archiving sets archivedAt on the product. The intent is “this product is no longer offered to new customers”. It is not a soft delete, and it is not a signal that existing customer relationships should stop.

Behavior after archive

Continues to work

  • Order creation against archived products is accepted. POST /v2/orders does not reject orders that reference an archived product. This protects integrations that hardcode product IDs.
  • Existing orders bill as normal. The billing engine resolves usage and credits through OrderLine.productId, which keeps pointing at the archived product. Order amendments and upgrades on those lines also continue to work.
  • Usage signals attribute correctly. Signals sent against an archived product (via POST /v2/signals, OTLP, or other ingest paths) continue to resolve to the customer’s existing order line and deduct credits or accrue usage as expected.
  • Cost ingest accepts records for archived products. POST /v2/cost accepts cost records that reference an archived product so that in-flight integrations keep working.
  • Checkout upgrade flows for customers already on a plan tied to the archived product continue to function.

Is prevented

  • Listing and pickers hide archived products. GET /v2/products excludes archived products from the default listing. Frontend pickers (onboarding pricing, checkout link creation, HubSpot product picker) hide them.
  • New promotions cannot target an archived product. Promotion scope must reference an active product at the time the promotion is created or edited.
  • Copy-to-live is blocked for archived source products.
  • Admin exports exclude archived products by default.
  • HubSpot CRM sync does not surface archived products to new HubSpot views.

Is a no-op

  • Existing promotions that already reference a product are not retroactively invalidated when that product is archived. They continue to apply to in-flight customers.

Unarchiving

Setting archivedAt back to null (via POST /v2/products/:id/unarchive) restores the product to active state. Existing customer relationships were never disturbed, so unarchiving is purely a UI/listing operation.

Guidance for integrators

You can safely hardcode product IDs in your integration. If a product is archived on Paid’s side:

  • Order creation against the archived product still succeeds.
  • Usage signals against the archived product continue to bill.
  • Product pickers and listings (e.g. the dashboard, checkout-link creation UI) will hide the archived product, so new checkout links and new orders set up through Paid’s UI will use a successor product.