#0xL34N
radiant veldt
pale marsh
Hi 👋 it depends on how you would like your customers to be invoiced.
Would you rather report usage regarding the number of emails they sent throughout the month, and then charge them at the end of the month?
Or would you rather charge them the typical flat fee up front at the beginning of a billing period, and then only charge for overages at the end of a billing period?
gilded echo
Second option
Each month we will charge the silver rate, the other rate will only be included if the customer exceeds the given emial limit and consumes extras, so it would not always be consumed, so this second rate would be charged on a monthly basis, so to speak.
Any suggestion?
pale marsh
Gotcha, then yeah I would use two separate Prices for that.
gilded echo
Oka and how would it be? Could you help me with those 2 types of prices. And then if the user wants to switch between different plans will there be any problem or can do it without problems within the customer protal?
pale marsh
It will depend partly on how you want to build your integration. For the flat-fee that would most likely be licensed, per-unit Price:
https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/pricing-models#per-seat
For the usage based amount, you can leverage our usage-based Price models, or handle that logic yourself:
https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/pricing-models#usage-based-pricing
gilded echo
What does the following error mean when creating a customer portal configuration?
For each product, its price must have unique billing intervals. The following prices have duplicate intervals: price_1NIWVlJfnvH5JDKWdHSw4ZiO, price_1NIWWrJfnvH5JDKWZu5NQODH.
What do you mean by "unique billing intervals"?
pale marsh
That's telling you that both of those Prices have the same billing period (in this case 1-month)
gilded echo
This is not possible?
One is type "Volume Pricing" and the other one is "Standard Pricing"
Isn't that how I have to do it?
pale marsh
That seems right, you don't want to allow your customer to make changes to the Price that represents you charging them overages though do you?
The error you're encountering is thrown when creating a portal configuration, if you don't want to let customers change the Price that you're using for the overage charges, then I would recommend trying to avoid including that Price in the portal configuration you're creating.
gilded echo
Oka but what happens when the user goes from a Free Plan and in the Portal wants to choose the Pro, when you add the option of the price for additional use?
pale marsh
Your integration will want to control the Price for overages, you do not want to let Customers have any influence over that or they'd be able to change what they are billed.
You will likely want your integration to have a webhook endpoint that listens for customer.subscription.updated Events
https://stripe.com/docs/webhooks
Then if you receive that Event you'll check to see if the updates to the Subscription included adding your base price, and if so you would want to then edit the Subscription to add your Price for overages to the Subscription as well.
gilded echo
Perfect, I understand.
And can I add to the current subscription the other price that is in charge of charging the excess usage? Can you tell me where to look for this information? And also if you are so kind, could you help me to see how to update this data of the surplus data for Stripe to charge based on that number? Thank you.
pale marsh
Yes, your server can make calls to our API to update existing Subscriptions:
https://stripe.com/docs/api/subscriptions/update
https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/change
You will want to use the items array to pass in the details needed to create a new item using the other Price that you'd like to use.
If you want Stripe to calculate the overage based on the amount of usage you provide, you'll want to use a metered Price for that:
https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/pricing-models#metered
Instructions for reporting usage can be found here:
https://stripe.com/docs/products-prices/pricing-models#reporting-usage
gilded echo
Thanks a lot! You're the best
pale marsh
Any time! I know there is a bunch of context there, so let us know if anything doesn't make sense or if anything is still unclear after taking a look through the docs.