Understand now I need to create a customer profile on stripe before I can 'update' the subscription.. hmm any ideas on how to create a subscription w/out having them enter in their cc info the very first time?

Edit for clarify: To put this better, any way to create a stripe customer without a card, on the API side of things, I see you can on Stripe's dashboard.

Solution was to use Stripe's native API interface (not Cashier) to..

1. Create a Customer (without a card)
2. Add a pre-generated coupon (100% off) to the customer's account
3. Assign a plan to the customer.

No support what so ever in Cashier, hopefully soon.

We had a quite similar issue/need, where we wanted to instantly charge, but also store the user for later, and solved it this way:

public function stripeStoreAndCharge($user, $stripeToken) {

    // Needs "use Laravel\Cashier\StripeGateway;"
    $stripe = new StripeGateway($user);

    // Create a Stripe customer, incl. his card data
    $customer = $stripe->createStripeCustomer(
        $stripeToken,
        ['email' => $user->email]
    );

    // Store Stripe ID, etc. in the database.
    $stripe->updateLocalStripeData($customer);

    // Finally we can charge the customer, now and later, as we just stored his details.
    $user->charge(10000, ['currency' => 'php']);
}

You could probably also just use what the stripe/stripe-php package provides, but this here seemed simpler.

I'm just posting this for reference, because I also had a hard time realizing that this case wasn't covered by Cashier. ;)