Which HTTP status code is correct for Subscription cancel exception?

Which HTTP status code is correct for Subscription Canceled exception?

I need to throw an exception when the user tries to accesses a certain page.

I checked a few statuses like Payment Required, but it's not satisfying the requirement. Any suggestion?

> Which HTTP status code is correct for Subscription cancel exception?

HTTP status codes belong to the transfer documents over a network domain.

So the specifics of what is going on in your domain don't particularly matter - the idea is to understand the error condition in terms of document transfer, and work from there.

In this case, the best fit is likely 403 Forbidden

> The 403 (Forbidden) status code indicates that the server understood the request but refuses to authorize it. A server that wishes to make public why the request has been forbidden can describe that reason in the response payload (if any).

It may help to imagine how this example would play out on a web site. For the human user, you would return a bunch of HTML explaining that their subscription had been cancelled, perhaps with links to resources that would allow the user to re-subscribe, and so on.

For the browser, you would have the HTTP meta data, including the status code, so that the browser would understand the general purpose semantics of the message (for instance, should earlier representations of the resource be invalidated in the cache).

> it's a API request from front-end.

This doesn't really enter into the discussion; the motivation for the uniform interface is that we can swap out the implementations at either end of the conversation and the semantics of the self descriptive messages don't change.

I would say that correct Response code is:

> 401 Unauthorized

Since by the definition the user Cancelled his subscription and cannot more access paid content, therefore user is Unauthorized for that.
In the other words User is Authenticated but Unaouthorized to do this request.

I'd like to offer an alternative solution. 403 errors make a lot of sense here, as access is denied for a resource. However, this could be difficult to handle in the front-end, because it's indiscernible from a 403 error caused by lacking permissions or roles. A 402 error is non-standard, but "Payment Required" would be easier to program around. If using a non-standard HTTP code is allowed, I believe this to be a more suitable status to return from an API based on a cancelled subscription, or a lack of a valid subscription in general.