Looking for a Subscription model plugin or a logic to solve it custom

Question

I am developing a website which sells subscriptions.

PROBLEM:

Actually the subscriptions are the products that I sell. Each Subscription has 8 different sub products (The actual physical product) within them. Eg: A 3 month science subscription has Science magazines within them, which will be shipped every month for 3 months. These magazines are not available without subscription. How to go about from here.

1. Have a subscription plugin that can solve this? If so what is it?
2. Build it custom? Please give me good way points to achieve my goal

I am pretty new to magento.

WHAT I VE RESEARCHED:

I looked at AheadWorks subscription plugin. Does seem to be great but they treat physical objects as the product and subscription as an option. Also their payments are recurring. Eg. $1 per month for 3 months. I need $3 completely and buy the subscription. Almost few others treat it in a same way.

Help me out in what I must do.

Answer 1

You can try Recurring profiles. is used for subscriptions and recurring payment.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/working-with-recurring-profiles

Answer 2

As you've already mentioned,

I looked at AheadWorks subscription plugin. Does seem to be great but they treat physical objects as the product and subscription as an option.

So, aheadworks plugin satisfies your SUBSCRIPTION purpose!

• You can create a configurable product (like, science magazines) with 8 simple products (each individual magazines) where simple products are not enabled and visible, but configurable product is visible from front-end.

• I hope that'll definitely serve your purpose! And about the recurring payments, you can contact aheadworks regarding this.

Answer 3

So for an answer on the payment side. What you could do is take the payment during the recurring payment method submitRecurringProfile which happens when the initial orderis placed. Then on all recurring orders simply create the order but take no payment, this approach would allow for you to take an initial payment with no follow up payments while still using Magento for order creation.