A club with no subscription yet can be started on a short trial (e.g. 2 months) from the control panel, on a tier picked up front for what it switches to once the trial ends -- no manual follow-up needed. The trial is a real billed period on a dedicated trial tier, reusing the existing invoice/grace/archive machinery unchanged; the switch happens in open_period() itself so it fires whether reached via the scheduled renewal command or a platform admin's manual "Open period" click. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01R1gj3J1QPfP38XWpnpbFpy