When creating a subscription, how does the APPROVED status differ from ACTIVE in the HTTP response?

[henrywright]

When creating a subscription, the status value in the HTTP response can be APPROVED but it can also be ACTIVE. See https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/subscriptions/v1/#subscriptions_create

How are these different? Surely if the subscription is approved then the subscription is active.

[MTS-Aaron · Accepted solution]

Hi @henrywright 

So, you can actually have a subscription be "Approved" without being active. Some merchants may need to set the start date at a later time. For example, they may have a furniture rental program that is "no money down, first 2 days are free, then payments of 15.99 a week after that". In this case, they could set the "Start date" to be 2 days from the time the customer signed up for the subscription. For 2 days, it would be approved but not active. 

I hope that helps!

-Aaron