If I set TOTALBILLINGCYCLES to zero in paypal recurring payment, will that payment profile live forever?

Question

I am bit confused about recurring payment and it's lifetime. I am trying to figure out do I have to update recurring payment profile somehow after that year passes or not. I am reading from https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/api/createrecurringpaymentsprofile-api-operation-nvp#id09BNA01I0E9 following:

The combination of BillingPeriod and BillingFrequency cannot exceed one year.

But there is also a TOTALBILLINGCYCLES param which states

For the regular payment period, if no value is specified or 
the value is 0, the regular payment period continues until the 
profile is canceled or deactivated.

It suggests that I don't need to do anything with profile if I'ts set to zero. Am I right?

Answer 1

BillingPeriod and BillingFrequency are different from the lifetime of the recurring billing account.

BillingPeriod is how long should Paypal wait between charges? Daily? Weekly? Monthly?

BillingFrequency is how many times in a year will this user be charged.

So if you have a BillingPeriod of weekly and a BillingFrequency of 52 the user will be charged every week of the year. If you have a BillingPeriod of weekly and a BillingFrequency of 26 the user will be charged every week for the first half of the year and then they will not be billed anymore.

TOTALBILLINGCYCLES is how long do you want this subscription to run for. If you set it to zero it runs forever (until cancelled). If you set it to 3 then it will bill the user for three billings cycles (3 years) and then terminate itself.