#bakermd - subscription limit
ruby bison
pseudo rain
Can you explain the use case for this? I would generally say there should be multiple customers used here.
bakermd - webhook events
bakermd - subscription limit
small dirge
We facilitate remote legal proceedings, i.e. depositions/mediations/arbitrations/etc. and each Case opened in our platform has an associated Subscription. The law firms we are closing deals with will have thousands of Cases, and thus thousands of Subscriptions. There are a number of activities a customer can perform on a Case that incurs usage fees, and the firm must be able to pass the costs along to their clients. If we just showed them a bill with 500 Small Cases and 1,500 Medium cases, and 500GB of usage charges for storage across All Small Cases, that would not be detailed enough for them. Looking into ways we can work around it
pseudo rain
Gotcha - that sounds tricky. Let me see what i can find. As a stop-gap you can create another customer for them and aggregate more subscriptions there.
small dirge
Gotcha - that would certainly require some re-work on our side as the stripe_customer_id is a field at the organization level in our system currently. The other concern would be that the client receives multiple invoices each month, one per customer record
Thanks for researching!
pseudo rain
Can you share an example failing request where you hit this?
small dirge
Good question
pseudo rain
Oh, sorry, actually nevermind
We raised this a couple of years ago, the limit used to be 25 and is now 500
Beyond creating additional customers, you could also consolidate some subscriptions to include multiple subscription items, but even then you'd eventually have a similar issue
I think splitting this into multiple customers is the way to go, we are unlikely to be able to raise that 500 limit any time soon
small dirge
Interesting - okay.
Follow up question then:
If we have 3 subscriptions at a customer level (Small Case, Medium Case, Large Case) and have quantities/line items/etc. on each, are we able to handle adding a case mid-month and have just that item prorated? So the 300 Small Cases I already had are getting billed each month in full as expected, but on the 15th I add Small Case #301, will it be able to prorate appropriately?
pseudo rain
Yes, you can have quantity changes prorated
(or you can disable proration, up to you)
small dirge
Very nice. Thanks @pseudo rain !!
Oh wait - so you're saying we'd hit the same 500 limit on a subscription?
I.e. no more than 500 count per sub?
pseudo rain
Ultimately a customer can only have 500 subscriptions. Each subscription can have up to 20 items: https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions/create#create_subscription-items
pseudo rain
So some items can be bucketed together, or you can add items to existing subscriptions
but this is likely more complicated than having two customers
small dirge
My concern is that one of our clients would need to have 5,000 subscriptions. That would mean they have to have 10 customer records, 10 invoices, 10 separate charges each month. Correct?
rain junco
Yes, that would be necessary here unfortunately given the current limitations
Wait actually, the 10 customers would be accurate but 5000 subscriptions would generate 5000 separate charges and 5000 invoices. You could consolidate that by having 20 items per subscription but that would still be 250 charges + invoices. You could make your own custom invoices to consolidate that but I assume the amount of charges would still not be a great experience
small dirge
What if we do not automatically send invoices to customers and instead do roll-up invoicing? I.e. each of the 250 Users in our system that are members of the same law firm get Customer records in Stripe. No single user is likely to hit the 500 active subscription limit. Instead of allowing Stripe to send automated invoices, we use tools available in Stripe to consolidate the 250 user invoices into a single invoice we process manually. Is that an option?
rain junco
Hey apologies for the delay. Yes that could work, you could basically make one charge that represents payment on all of the actual subscriptions that the user has and then mark the 250 invoices as "paid out of band", usually that means paid out of Stripe but here it would just mean paid elsewhere in Stripe https://stripe.com/docs/api/invoices/pay#pay_invoice-paid_out_of_band
You'd have to write the custom logic to basically say "this invoice is for these 250 other invoices" but that should work as a way to work within these limitations on subscriptions/invoices