#andrei.sabau
eternal crow
opaque marlin
Hi, we document downgrades/ upgrades here: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/upgrade-downgrade for a Subscription. So when you are ready to charge for the subscirption, you can create a price for that rate and adjust the quantity for the user. Then, if they add or delete a user during that month, you would update the subsciprtion like the document above suggests. The only thing is that you're trying to bill the customer at the end of the month, but to me it sounds contradictory to the two bullet points above. Are you able to clarify?
thin moth
With the second bullet point I wanted to say:
- If a customer adds a new user and then deletes it after a couple of days during the same month I should only bill for that interval
A customer can have any number of users (0, 1, 50, 100, whatever).
And the price for a user if you choose the Business plan is $10 / month.
If you are familiar to how Digital Ocean bills the customers at the end of each month for their usage of Droplets that's exactly what I want to achieve.
Let's take a very simple example
opaque marlin
We handle prorations for you, https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/prorations so during the month when you make a changes, we calculate only for the amount that was used.
I'm not familiar with Digital Ocean so yeah, going through an example with specific dates would be helpful
thin moth
I have a customer with a payment method on file.
I have a product that has one price ($10) defined as Standard pricing, recurring with a Monthly period.
If the customer does:
- on the 10th, adds a new user that represents the product above
- on the 20th of the month deletes the user => usage of around 10 days => $10/30 days * 10 days used = around $3.33
On the 1st of the next month the customer should receive an invoice for the $3.33
I tried in every way possible to do this on the dashboard with creating prices (also tried with Metered), subscriptions, usage records, playing around with Test clocks and I was not able to replicate what I needed. 😦
opaque marlin
Yeah, in this case, you'd need to track this on your end and use Invoicing. Or, you can use usage billing: https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/usage-based#report where you report the usage and then bill on the 1st of the next month. I would recommend using the API and Test clocks. You mentioned that you used usage records, can you speak to how that did not work?
thin moth
Ok so basically this scenario needs custom development on my side and it's not possible out of the box with what Stripe offers.
Well, to be honest I'm not sure I used the Usage records correctly, I only tried to use (add them) the from the Dashboard.
But what I tried is having a Price ($10) with metered usage and billing period Monthly.
Then created a Test clock, added a user and a subscription for that Price, but with quantity 0.
At that point the invoice was 0.
Then I advanced the time of the Test clock to the 20th of the month.
And tried to update the quantity to 1.
It was saying the next invoice will be for $10 instead of calculating the price from the 20th of the month till the end of the month.
opaque marlin
Yeah, from what you described, it looks like you are likely looking at https://stripe.com/docs/billing/subscriptions/usage-based#report specially given that you want to the bill for the previous month at the 1st of the month. You will track this usage on your end and then feed it to Stripe.
thin moth
Yeah, I think that sounds about right.
Although I was expecting this to be a bit easier, it's a pretty common scenario in the SaaS world.
thin moth
I mean if I charge $10 / user / month. I would have expected just to send to Stripe on the 5th this customer has 10 users, then on the 15th it adds 5 more and has 15 users, then at the end of the month Stripe should make a prorated total and send the invoice to the customer.
At the moment after days of reading the docs my impression this is not achievable with using Subscriptions and usage records. Only by calculating the totals on my side and then just creating an invoice in Stripe at the end of the month.
opaque marlin
Yeah, you can calculate this on your end and then use Invoices to charge them at end of the month.
I need to step aways and closing this channel if you don't have any follow up questions.
thin moth
Thanks and have a nice weekend!