#Moshe
carmine sorrel
magic wedge
Options 1 and 2 have downsides that the product needs to do additional work to hack it to work. It also breaks some reporting tools.
I am leaning towards option 3. The only downside is that the usage will not be charged on a monthly cadence. Some users will get billed multiple times a month. While other users will carry a balance for multiple months.
Is there a way to trigger a charge for a usage balance in the middle of the billing period? This would allow me to set the Billing Threshold pretty high and then on the 1st of each month charge the balance.
cedar sigil
Hello 👋
Would you mind sharing an example with amounts for the fees? Just want to make sure I'm on the same page
magic wedge
For example, we are offering plans that are $99 a month or $999 a year.
In addition to the base charge, there is also a charge for usage. Usage is billed at $0.0004 per use.
The base fee is one Product with two Prices. One Price for monthly and one for Annual.
cedar sigil
I don't know if you've explored this yet but you could go with usage based pricing model and add on the flat fees (per month or year) by calling the API manually
https://stripe.com/docs/billing/invoices/subscription#adding-upcoming-invoice-items
Which is option 2
basically
magic wedge
Yea
cedar sigil
But would recommend that over having separate subscriptions and thresholds
As it won't mess with the actual usage
magic wedge
Here is the list of downsides I have for option 2
- Added complexity for tracking when the annual fees are due and amending the invoice.
- Stripe Customer Portal will not show the annual fees as part of the subscription.
- Need to manually handle prorations
- If we add additional annual billing (for example, charge per user) we would need to handle all of this on our end
Because of these downsides, I felt option 3 was the best. Since it leaves most of the Subscription handling to Stripe
Why would you not recommend option 3?
cedar sigil
Due to limitations of thresholds
https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/pricing-models#limitations
You may see some unexpected behavior (not 100% sure as I have not implemented these myself) but you could try it out and see if it works for your use-case
magic wedge
The limitations do not seem like they would be an issue.
If I would go with option 3, then I also had this question:
Is there a way to trigger a charge for a usage balance in the middle of the billing period? This would allow me to set the Billing Threshold pretty high and then on the 1st of each month charge the balance.
cedar sigil
As far as I know, not without resetting the billing cycle anchor