Moving a working paid channel is frightening for one reason: the people already in it are paying, and a mistake means either locking out somebody who has paid or letting in somebody who has not. Both are recoverable. Neither is pleasant.
The good news is that the move is mostly bookkeeping. Your channel does not change. Your subscribers do not have to do anything on the day. What changes is which software is holding the door.
What transfers, and what does not
Your subscriber list transfers
Who is in the channel, what they bought and when their access ends is data, and data exports.
Your channel transfers
In the sense that it does not move at all. It is your channel; you add a new bot as an administrator and remove the old one when you are ready.
Recurring billing does not transfer
If the subscriptions were created under somebody else's payment account. No provider will move active billing tokens to a different merchant. This is the part to plan around, and the reason to own your payment account from the start.
The order that keeps everybody's access unbroken
Do it in this order and nobody notices.
- Set the new system up completely — bot, channel, plans, your own payment account — while the old one is still running. Change nothing that is live.
- Import your subscribers with the dates their access currently ends. Now both systems agree about who is in and until when.
- Add the new bot to the channel as an administrator. Two bots can sit in a channel at once. Do not remove the old one yet.
- Let the new system run alongside for a few days and check it agrees with the old one about who should be in.
- Switch new sales to the new checkout, and let the existing subscriptions run out where they are. As each one ends, that person resubscribes on the new price.
- Remove the old bot when the last old subscription has lapsed.
The overlap is the whole trick. There is no moment where the door is held by nothing.
The one thing to decide in advance
Whether to ask existing subscribers to move their billing across early, or let each subscription lapse and resubscribe naturally.
Asking early is faster and costs you some of them — every re-entry of a card is a chance to reconsider. Letting them lapse naturally takes as long as your longest subscription and loses almost nobody, because by the time they are asked, their access has genuinely ended and resubscribing is the obvious move.
If you have annual plans, the slow route takes a year. It is still usually
the right one.