debugged

[turbid bough]

Generally you'd do it via free trial, or schedule the update to happen at a specific timestamp

[sturdy cedar]

I don't want it to be free though, I want to bill just the period of the month the user actually used the product. I don't want them to have to pay for a whole month in advance if they decide to only use it for a few hours or days.

I suppose I could do it with metered billing, but that seems like an unnecessarily large amount of extra work for this case. I guess metered billing makes more sense for API usage billing or for example storage usage.

[turbid bough]

It wouldn't be free as that 'free trial' period would be time they'd alreayd paid for at the beginning of the cycle

It just prevents resetting the billing anchor and charging them upfront

[sturdy cedar]

I suppose I dont exactly understand how this would work. Could you explain it in some more detail?

Basically what I am trying to achieve is a system similar to for example AWS or Digital Ocean, where you can create and delete compute instances during your billing cycle and only get billed for it at the end of the cycle based on the usage during the cycle.

[turbid bough]

Well that sounds more like a usage based model as opposed to a license model based on what your originally asked

[sturdy cedar]

Right, so I would in fact need to use metered billing and keep track of minutes used for example?

[turbid bough]

I mean that's your call but it sounds more aligned with your product/application to me. With metered billing we only bill at the end of the period according to the usage you report to use

So, in your example, users can stop/start instances as and when they require and you report that usage to us

[sturdy cedar]

Yes, I think that can work. I guess the functionality I am missing is where I can simply report that the user is using 'X' of a certain item and then 'X-2' for example after a few days and Stripe itself would then calculate the cost based on the total monthly price. I hope that makes sense 🙂

Now we only have the option to use the sum or last value for example

[turbid bough]

Not sure what X-2 means?

[sturdy cedar]

They remove 2 compute instances, for example

They had 5 for a while, then after a few days they decide they only need 3

[turbid bough]

Yeah I don't think you can track quantity like that on a single item with metered billing. You'd likely need multiple items, and then remove the items when they are disabled

[sturdy cedar]

But if I remove items, are they still accounted for in the final invoice?

I guess I know what I need to know now though. The idea I had in mind isn't as easy as I thought with the options in Stripe. I will try setting up the system where I track minutes used and use that in a metered billing subscription to charge per minute.

[turbid bough]

That is honestly something I'm not sure about

My recommendation would be to use a test clock to simulate some of these scenarios you envision happening in your application

[sturdy cedar]

I will try playing around with those, thanks!